pn-20 cachemate article

[parmachenee]

Rigt now I am getting very close to going down and talking to a few managers and screaming till they accept a return and refund my money. I am getting very close to never wanting anything to do with Delorme ever again.

Sorry to hear about your problems but they appear to be somewhat unique. I've had my PN-20 for over a year and other than the original problems that firmware improvements have dealt with, I have had great luck with it. I had a problem with the first one I owned but called tech support and returned it and had a new one within a week. I've had it out kayaking on the ocean, on streams and lakes and it has taken many baths in the process but it never leaked or allowed water inside. I have fallen with it as it broke my fall and still has the gouges in the casing to prove it and it kept on ticking. It is excellent for geocaching...if you are walking faster than it can process your position than you must be superman!! And with firmware update 1.4 you can turn off topo maps to speed up the road-routing calculation...but it still isn't as fast as my Nuvii 350 which I use for most road-routing demands. I've found tech support to be very cooperative and responsive to my concerns so I don't know what is happening in your case. I have maps loaded on SD cards for areas I frequent most so don't have to load new maps when going to a different region. But I find the precut maps very easy to load if I want to change maps so that shouldn't be a problem. I don't use the Li-ION battery that came with it but use NiMH batteries so when it is plugged in inside my vehicle the screen remains at its brightest setting. There are still a couple of shortcomings that need to be addressed but with the improvements made since its release I find it to be a very durable and reliable gpsr.

[attroll]

So far have am starting to loose my patients with them. The people all seem nice enough just not real thrilled with have to restart the unit and redownload the software multiple times to finnally get it to run even remotely passing. It is also still slow and very clunky for geocaching and I have not been impressed with the charging ability that the unit has, that feature has never really worked and the screen backlight dims when you are charging making it hard to read on the dash in the daylight. The unit is supposed to be watter tight but over the weekend I had it tied to the top of my kayak and it did not fare well. I called monday to arrange for a replacment and the Rep was going to set up an exchange at the store for me . he did not do that and only set up and RMA. now for most of this week I have been calling trying to get a status update and arrange for pickup of a GPS and I am told that no one in that department takes calls and they are refusing to call me back. Rigt now I am getting very close to going down and talking to a few managers and screaming till they accept a return and refund my money. I am getting very close to never wanting anything to do with Delorme ever again.

I have been told that the GPS does not have recharging capabilites. Who told you that is recharges?

I have never had to restart my unit to download the software. It is a little slow and chunky. I have found if I only load the state of Maine on the GPS that it is a little faster or it seems so. I had the whole east coast on it before from Floridia to Maine.

[attroll]

I finally decided to look at this thread and the article. Why is the title of the article "Maine Geocaching stats"?

Thanks for pointing this out Dave. I fixed it.

[parmachenee]

I have been told that the GPS does not have recharging capabilites. Who told you that is recharges?

I have never had to restart my unit to download the software. It is a little slow and chunky. I have found if I only load the state of Maine on the GPS that it is a little faster or it seems so. I had the whole east coast on it before from Floridia to Maine.

The PN-20 will recharge the Li-ION battery that comes with it but not NiMH batteries. I have my local Maine maps on the internal memory just for speed and have the rest of NE and NY down through PA loaded on the SD card. I click off the checkbox on all maps I'm not using in the map management option so it only references those I want to use. The only clunkiness I've encountered is loading a gpx file of more than a couple hundred caches. It begins to slow down around 2 or 3 hundred and if you have 900 to 1000 it will take 20-25 minutes to download them all. Delorme is supposed to be addressing this in a future firmware update.

[robt]

Well as of today I have not heard from anyone and am still without a GPS. I think this is what is irrating me the most that with the fact that I can not get an answer as to when to expect a return or arrange pickup on the unit. Most of the issues that my 2nd unit had seemed to be worked out till I tried to take it Kayaking. I assume it is just a bad seal but after waiting a week now and not getting any responce from delorme is frustrating. As for the rechargable batteries it is not good for a weekend of heavy caching but that is why I have my other batteries. We will see if I acctually here from someone tommorrow.

[iampaw]

I have had my PN-20 since the beginning of March and Have had no problems with it. I think it's great for geocachng. I like it better than the Garmin that I had.

[attroll]

TI have my local Maine maps on the internal memory just for speed and have the rest of NE and NY down through PA loaded on the SD card.

How do I import Maine to internal memory?