Oregon 450t
I’ve been doing two cache trips so far with my new 450t and here are some first impressions.
As a reminder, I’ve bought the 450t – as replacement for my 60cx – for a couple of reasons:
- it sounds silly, but the lack of a compass in the 60cx resulted in the fact that one needed always to walk in a certain direction in order to know whether it’s the good direction or not. Since the 450t has a 3-axis compass, this problem is solved
- maybe it’s also due to the lack of compass, but the 60cx had sometimes his quirks in showing my position on the map. Recently, I was doing this bike cache with backtracking and according to the 60cx, I was way of the track whilst the 60csx of my fellow cachers showed thate everything was fine
- The interface of the 60cx is a bit corny. Eg. entering coordinates reminds me of the times of the punch card, ages ago (yes I’m that old).
Things promise to be better with the Oregon 450t, so I bought one of these. An additional reason was the fact that the Swiss topo cards are very expensive. Since I only needed them for my holiday, it’s cheaper to by a Oregon 450t with indeed less detail (more on that later).
So I unboxed it the other day and I noticed that it’s a rather heavy device. Officially it’s about 11g lighter than the 60cx, but subjectively speaking it feels heavier. It’s certainly heavier than the Dakota I’ve tested for a couple hours. I wonder what that is. Is that extra cm of screen (diagonally) so much heavier?
Anyway, unpacking it further I discover the famous Carabiner clip. I don’t know what to think about it. At first, it took me a while to get it fixed to the device and even longer to release it again. It looks rather fragile and I wonder how long it lasts since one needs to remove it each time one needs replace batteries – which will happen more than on a 60Cx anyway (more on that later). A redesign might be wishful in order to let the clip fixed all times. Whilst one is doing this, one might also rethink the direction of fixture of the clip too. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you will typically use the Carabiner clip in order to hang it one of the straps of your rucksack. I guess it’s not the idea to remove the GPSr each time you want to look at it. Well, if you leave it fixed and want to look at it, the screen is upside down. Not handy at all. The strange/funny thing is that one can use a lanyard in order to carry the device around the neck. Well the foreseen hole for this is at the bottom end of the 450t and thus when one looks at the screen, it’s in the good direction.
Ok, you want to enter the batteries in the device and you wonder how things work and you want to consult the Quick Start Guide for this. If you happen to understand Dutch only, you’ve bad luck. The guide is provided is several languages, except Dutch, which is a pity. I even wonder if it’s 100% legal since there are some specifications in BE on the languages a product should be sold in. Sure, one can download the desired languages from the Garmin site if needed, but one can’t speak about a Quick Start anymore in that case.
I decide to skip the Quick Start Guide and to put the device on. Since it’s the first time, it’s searching for my exact location. Since it doesn’t seem to find the satellites inside home this time – no problems the second time and after that - I decide to take it outside. I got enough satellite signals after 5-10 minutes. Whislt waiting, I see that the problems with the readability in the sun aren’t that bad at all. In fact, I found it more readable in plain sun although I must have to admit that I left the protective foil on the screen since the Invisible Shield wasn’t arrived yet. After applying the shield, I didn’t have any problems with readability either. No, I didn’t use any of this white background images either and set it to the green camouflage background.
So that’s it for now. In a further blog I’ll elaborate on how the device performs during geocaching, which is my main goal for using this device.
