Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
First impressions of the Garmin 76Cx.
I finally got my Garmin 76Cx yesterday, and have spent some time playing with it. This page details my first impressions -- obviously, if I've only had it for a day, I haven't explored a lot of its capabilities.
Background for this review is that I'm coming from a Garmin 12Map, which is basically a GPS III+ in a 12-series case, and limited to vertical orientation only. It's a comparatively limited GPS, with a mono screen, no autorouting, and a 1.44MB memory size. I got the 76Cx to use on a motorcycle, so things like waterproofness, and the ability to use it with gloves on were important in the decision.
First off, the 76Cx feels pretty solid. It's light (Garmin claims it floats, although I haven't tested that), but it doesn't feel cheap. It doesn't creak or shift at all, and still manages to convey a good sense of quality, which sparse devices sometimes fail at. The buttons are big, and relatively easy to hit. On mine, they're also pretty stiff, requiring a reasonably hard press to register. My thumb is actually sore from the limited key pressing I've done so far.
Inserting batteries was easy, but I noticed that one battery got a coiled spring on its negative terminal, while the other got a leaf type spring. I wonder if one of them will fail sooner than the other. The MicroSD card is truly micro. I fear I'd lose it very very easily -- it's about the size of my pinky nail.
On powerup, there's a brief flash of the screen, followed maybe 3 seconds after you hit the button by a series of ascending tones and a welcome screen. The unit quickly switches to the satellite acquisition screen. When I'm outside and doing a warm startup, it already knows where it is by the time the satellite page comes up (about 7 seconds after the first poweron page). In my office (on the ground floor, with two stories of concrete-and-rebar above me), I get zero signal. On the second floor, I just barely got some signal -- hardly the "indoor navigation" Garmin claimed, but it would be amazing if any signal penetrated this building.
I took it out with me to lunch yesterday, and travelled a more roundabout route to and from lunch than I normally take, checking out the receiver a bit. It had a hard time with walking speed some of the time, having me going all sorts of wacky directions, and at a variety of speeds. The basemap, I also noticed, is stinky, having only major roads (like freeways) shown, and the one that I passed under in real life remained half a mile away on the screen. It had none of the surface streets which even the 12Map has in its basemap. To be fair, I didn't touch either the provided software or the City Select v7 that I got with the unit, and it looks like the provided software includes a slightly better map than what's preloaded.
One of my first problems in actually using the GPS was that I couldn't figure out how to get cardinal directions (N or NW, for instance) and compass heading (358° for instance) to show. I could get one or the other, but not both. I called Garmin today, and confirmed that that's the case -- you're limited to either cardinal letters for direction, or degrees (or mils), but you can't mix-n-match. This is kind of an "oh well" for me, but I can see how some people would be annoyed. I passed on the suggestion that "Heading - degrees" and "Heading - cardial letters" (and so on for the several other bearing-type databoxes) be added to the list of customizable data fields.
The 76Cx still uses the PAGE and QUIT keys to move between pages, which I got used to in the 12XL and 12Map. This GPS has the ability to add pages into the page rotation (and take them out), which is quite handy. I've left it in the default setting for now, but I'll probably play with it more as I develop a sense of what I'd rather have available. I think every single data field can be customized to some extent in this receiver, which is a great feature to have.
Unfortunately, some fields are missing. As I mentioned above, there's no way to show "N" and "358°" at the same time. Also gone is the compass tape across the top of the screen which the 12XL and 12Map had. The list of fields which can be included, while very long, feels incomplete -- some of the data I'd really like to see doesn't seem to be there. Like voltage. I have a feeling there are others, but I can't think of them at the moment.
The screen is pretty quick to respond when switching pages. The CPU is obviously speedy. Route calculation seems quick to me, but I've never really used an autorouting GPS before. I've got it set to the next-to-slowest setting, which is the default.
The autorouting (once I installed the detailed maps from City Select) started out pretty good. I had it calculate the routes between a few places I go all the time (work, my house, a business, etc.), and the routes usually made sense. The only one that didn't make any sense was when it routed me through a recent construction zone, so I can't really complain.
Then, I tried it on a couple of simple freeway trips. The first one was extremely wacky because I just wanted to go down I-5, but forgot that I'd set it to avoid freeways (I had been seeing what kind of cool route it might come up with for motorcycle rides). It tried to route me off at every exit. The perplexing part of that is that I'd forgotten all about the "avoid freeways" setting. Maybe one just gets used to checking settings.
The other funny thing was that, coming back, I went a different way (and remembered to change my preferences); it routed me by a reasonable but traffic-prone route. I took a slightly alternate route (going from Renton to Seattle at 3:30 pm on Friday -- I chose 405 to 90, it chose 405 to 520). But once I took my alternate turn, it spent the next 20 minutes (about as long as it took to go half way along my alternate) telling me to get off at the next exit and turn around. It was remarkably insistent.
The screen is quite good, although it looks dim when inside. Under even a dark overcast sky, the screen is very readable, though. The backlight is very good, evenly lighting the screen. It has some large number of brightness levels (21, in fact).
Surprisingly to me, the beeper is very quiet. Where I could hear the beeper on either the 12XL or 12Map at 50 MPH with earplugs in, the 76Cx is so quiet that it's inaudible above about 25 MPH on the motorcycle. It's about right inside a quiet car, but far too quiet to be useful on a motorcycle, or with an outboard motor running on a small boat. It's not a big deal, since I usually turn off the beeper, but I can see how that's a useful detail for some people who might read this.
Physically, I'm glad to see that the 76Cx still retains the "standard" Garmin plug, the 4-pin circular plug. The USB port on the unit is a standard size, so you're not utterly stuck if you lose the Garmin-supplied cable. The external antenna connector is the standard MCX my other GPS receivers have had.
I've had the GPS through several downpours now, and the unit is not obviously the worse for wear. That's exactly what I expected, but there's a difference between "believe us when we say our product is waterproof" and "I just got back from this rainstorm, and it's still working."
Posted at 00:35 permanent link category: /gadgets
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater