GPSrChive Discussion Forum

The key benefit of hibernation is the ability to quickly get a fix on my position. The big advance Satmap gave when it was first launched was to tie this to a 'proper' map. No other device at that time provided an ability to have good quality maps stored on the device and a screen capable of displaying them.

I agree that I get the same basic Use Case by turning off the 66, but the usability of the 66 in comparison to the Satmap in this mode is far inferior. However it is probably how I will need to use the 66. Since resuming from hibernation is 15s and it is 20s from power on. I don't have enough real world experience to know yet what the satellite locks times will be from these modes. I am guessing it will be longer from power on? If is is minutes from power on but instant from Expedition I will need to go this way. I will need to remember to power down at the end of each day and also manage the tracks being automatically created.

Battery life is always an issue with these devices. Most people will use this device for day hikes. And today we have battery capacities and current draws that easily cope with a single day. Having the unit left on while you drive home is usually only an inconvenience of have a corrupt track. So this device will be perfectly acceptable to most of the purchasers. However having this happen when you are in the wilderness can be a bit more problematic.

My request to Garmin would be:-

1) Can they support instant on functionality from a Low Power Mode?
2) Will a non tracking Low Power Mode provide an even greater extended battery life over the current Expedition Mode. If so can this be supported. Only of any use if 1) above can be supported or there is a significant variation in satellite lock times between Power Off resume and Low Power resume.
3) Can they provide some user configurable timeouts from Low Power Modes to completely shut down the unit after a period of non use.

I just thought I would post an update to this after having some time to use the device more. I am getting much better resume times now in the real world of 3-5s which is really fine. The unit comes up and has a satellite lock almost instantly.

I still think the auto starting of track logs when the unit enters Expedition mode is an unwelcome 'feature'. If I don't have track logs running or auto start set I don't set why it should start automatically here. For one reason It causes lots of spurious tracks being created and uploaded to Garmin Connect if this is set as the default timeout mode. I hope they fix this in the next release.

I don't really need track pings every minute while in Expedition mode. Does anybody know if there is a significant battery saving in increasing the time of these. I see we have the ability to manually set these in normal mode but they are fixed at 1min in Expedition mode.

I still think an overriding user settable timeout to completely shut the unit off after a period of inactivity would be a good addition. By activity I mean operating the user interface. Something like 1hr, 2hr, 4hr, 8hr, 24hr, would be great. Thoughts?