Re: Magellan Crossover (2500T) vs. Garmin 478 vs. ??

David Chamberlain wrote:
Jack Erbes wrote:
I quit using Magellans with the Meridian models but on those, there were no USB connections on the GPS receivers yet so building maps to the card in a reader was a wonderful way to be able to do it. It was much, much faster than sending the same map to internal memory via a RS-232 serial port. And you could have much larger map files on the SD cards too.

The map file limit with Mapsend is about 246KB. However you can put as many region files on the SD card as the SD card will hold. You just have to use them one at a time. This would be a problem if I could be in two places at once, but I'm still working on that problem.

Are you sure about that map limit? I was using much larger maps than that on my Meridian Marine and Meridian Color.

I had DirectRoute North America V3 divided into 14 regions that ranged in size from 3.5 MB to 124 MB. Those 14 regions covered the Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and Canada, with a total storage requirement of about 1.6 GB. If I remember right, the maximum region size allowed was about 125 MB.

I was also using BlueNav charting and that was a little more of a problem in use because only one filename was recognized/allowed in use. The chart regions were not very large so I had to carry a PDA and un-name and re-name regions as I proceeded in order to travel across two or three regions a day. Seemed like a minor inconvenience at the time in comparison to not having the mapping. The Garmin 76Cx I'm using now does all the region changing on the fly.

I have the entire USA (lower 48), in region files that generally include one state, or in some cases 2, 3, 4, or 5 states, depending on the state sizes and shapes (try getting a rectangle around California without getting all of Nevada, for example).

Is that the DirectRoute NA V3 mapping? If so, your region sizes are probably similar to what I mention above.

I have a 2GB microSD card in the Explorist, in the included microSD to SD card holder. I don't remember for sure, and I'm too tired to get up and get the GPS, but I don't believe I'm using much of the SD cards capacity.

Having a 2 GB card pretty well filled up sounds about right, but I think you'll find your region files are much larger than 264KB.

<snip>
I'm not sure about Garmin, and I've not used a Magellan with a serial interface, but the Explorist 600 is slower than molasses in January. It's way faster (IMO), to open up the unit, take out the battery, take out the SD card and put it in a card reader.

The Garmin's are just as slow if you use the serial port. The "Mass Storage Mode" with the card in the GPS receiver is much faster, and creating the maps to the card in a card reader is a little faster than that.

<snip>
With the Magellan Explorist 600 (and Crossover), you simply name the detail map file whatever you want to and put them on the card. Then you can select which file to use by choosing the name from a list.

I miss being able to do that on the Garmins after doing it on the Meridians. Garmin gives you no card utilities at all. You can't cannot save routes and waypoints to or load them from the card either which I could do with the Meridians.

Garmin failed to study the Meridians or talk to people about their features when they designed the software for their "x" series handhelds. They really missed the ball on that.

But going to the eXplorist line from the Meridian Color was not going to be an upgrade for me. It was more like a sidestep or even a downgrade. I was going to lose a couple of the navigation screens that I liked on the Meridians and was also going to lose the ability to use my Topo 3D and BlueNav charting on an eXplorist.

I crunched the features and costs and decided to change over to the Garmin 76Cx. And I'm very happy with it, it is a good unit, but not perfect. I think the Garmins are the clear winners right now on hardware and software features but none of them are perfect.

If Magellan or Garmin either one was smart enough to combine the best features of all the models on the market, they be able to come up with a single "best" handheld.

Jack

--
Jack Erbes in Ellsworth, Maine, USA - jackerbes at adelphia dot net
(also receiving email at jacker at midmaine.com)
.

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