- 1. General Usage
- 1. What are the tiny 'D's in the bars on the satellite page?
- 2. How can I use my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx with a program that expects an NMEA datastream such as Microsoft Streets & Trips?
- 3. How can I take a screen dump or capture the image on my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx?
- 4. How can I upload custom icons to my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx?
- 5. What is the blue circle ("halo") that sometime surrounds me on a map?
- 6. Where can I find the owners manuals for these models?
- 7. On units with barometers, what's used for altitude?
- 8. Sometimes the unit will never leave "acquiring satellites" mode. What's up with that?
- 9. When I press 'find', there is no 'find address' option or it will not route to an address.
1. General Usage | |||||||||
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1. | What are the tiny 'D's in the bars on the satellite page? | ||||||||
It means your unit is receiving WAAS signal corrections for those satellites. | |||||||||
2. | How can I use my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx with a program that expects an NMEA datastream such as Microsoft Streets & Trips? | ||||||||
On products that use a serial port, you can use an aftermarket serial cable and attach it, but most users will find more joy in using USB with Garmin Spanner or GPSGate to create virtual COM ports that programs like Streets & Trips or Delorme can use. GPSGate is a more flexible program. Spanner does pretty much one thing - converting Garmin PVT to NMEA - but it does it for free. | |||||||||
3. | How can I take a screen dump or capture the image on my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx? | ||||||||
Garmin xImage will capture the screen of your GPS and save it to disk. | |||||||||
4. | How can I upload custom icons to my Garmin eTrex Vista HCx? | ||||||||
Garmin xImage will send custom icons to your GPS. | |||||||||
5. | What is the blue circle ("halo") that sometime surrounds me on a map? | ||||||||
The blue circle graphically illustrates the unit's concept of decreased accuracy on the map. The larger the circle is, the less accurate you should expect your position on the map to be. It is likely to be somewhere inside that circle, but the very fact that the unit has a reduced confidence in its position makes it wise to be skeptical of the data. | |||||||||
6. | Where can I find the owners manuals for these models? | ||||||||
The product manuals for these models can be found on Garmin's web site.
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7. | On units with barometers, what's used for altitude? | ||||||||
The unit always displays barometric data, but allows you to pick what's recorded in tracks. Enter Setup->Altimeter to see the options. If the Altimeter is set to 'Variable', the barometric height is recorded in the track logs. 'Fixed' mode records the GPS height. The displayed data on the screen is always barometric. Pilots, in particular, will prefer from 'Fixed Elevation' so that the altitude isn't confused by the cabin pressurization. THe only way to see GPS elevation is on the Satellite Page displayed in Menu->GPS | |||||||||
8. | Sometimes the unit will never leave "acquiring satellites" mode. What's up with that? | ||||||||
The symptoms to trigger it haven't been entirely easy to reproduce, but there's been some speculation that it's related to messing with the backlight while the unit is powering up. If MENU > MENU > Setup > ENTR > System > ENTR > MENU >Software Version > ENTR shows a GPS SW version of 0.00, you may either return your unit for (potentially out of warranty) "repair" or run WebUpdateer multiple times - people report 3-4 times being the norm - until the GPS firmware gets successfully flashed to the unit. | |||||||||
9. | When I press 'find', there is no 'find address' option or it will not route to an address. | ||||||||
The common causes of this are not having uploaded a detailed map via Mapsource, not ticking the 'Include Route Calculation' box, or using a detailed map that doesn't include routing info, such as many of the Topo products. | |||||||||
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