Garmin Montana

I agree, calling it floptana is like someone calling you an arsehole without even knowing you. It's not very constructive.

So on the new unit Garmin sent me, the OS is 4.7 and seems to work well. Is there any reason to upgrade to the latest OS?

Sole Editor.

I am OCD, and I like to keep a clean and consistent format throughout. Many others have contributed, including yourself.

It's been done.

http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=933022

Bruce

My Montana preformed flawlessly again today.

Mine too! So after doing some more testing, I am going to stick my neck out and say that StevAZ's scatter plot test simply does not equate to poor real world performance. My scatter plot was only slightly better than his, but I have been testing on National Geodetic Survey markers in my neighborhood. Every time, the Montana got me within 6 feet of the markers on the first try, even though if I stood over the marker it would wander around from 10 to 15 feet. I checked these markers for recent proofing and they had all been surveyed with DGPS in the last three years, so I believe the Lat/Long info is correct to within 5 centimeters or better. They are surveyed on the NAD83 Datum, but that and the WGS84 are only different by a maximum of a meter and usually much less.

If I set my own waypoints and went back to them days later, I got the same basic performance, 3 meter or better precision. All of this was with clear horizons and reasonably good satellite constellations and so is the best performance to be expected, adverse conditions could be much worse.

So, based on my testing, my Montana has 3 meter precision and 4 meter accuracy most of the time in Idaho. For tracking precision, within an hour after the track was set, precision was within a meter. After several days, the precision degraded to about 3 meters, still adequate for following a track on a bike. This was what I saw down in Utah a week or two ago when following somebody's downloaded track in a maze of ATV trails. No problem figuring out that I had taken a wrong turn before I was more than 20 yds down the wrong trail. This only occurred when the fork was less than about 25 degrees....more than that and it was obvious which was the right choice before the intersection.

Most of us that have had the unit for a year or two know that it is plenty accurate (and precise) for our needs, but I wanted to see if testing supported better or worse numbers than what Garmin has been telling us all along. It was interesting to me that the precision number on the satellite page almost exactly coincided with the test results.

So from now on, when it tells me I have 9 foot precision I will believe it, and when I'm in a canyon and it says 40 feet I'll believe it too. This must be why geocaches are almost never placed in narrow canyons!

As to why the day to day performance is much better than the scatter plot would suggest I have no explanation and I don't really care. MY unit is capable of getting me back to one end or the other of my truck from miles way in pitch darkness on a rainy night after a fruitless hunt just as well as any handheld Garmin ever built...period (as long as I didn't park in a canyon ). YMMV


AND.....this is my last post on this issue, I PROMISE!!!!!!:huh

Mine did not.

City Nav speed limit data was not displayed, and only the long green bar at the top of the nuvi dashboard was presented with the name of my next turn, but no lane assist or distance display in the top left corner. I could select the green bar and it would properly display the turn by turn route instructions. Also, no spoken directions. Yes, my maps are up to date, the firmware is up to date, and I have the proper TTS voices installed and enabled. CNNA was the only routable map enabled, along with the base map.

A few days ago, my Montana 650 was unable to locate a known address (switched from CNNA to OSM and found the address without issue.)

And just a couple days ago while hiking some trails, I had my Montana on my pack, recording a track log, and nothing else. When the hike was finished, I wanted to check the Montana to see how long the hike was (etc), and of course found that the unit had CRASHED at some point during the hike. So, no track log.

Of course, I never carry only one GPSr, and I had two Oregon 6xx with me as well. Perhaps this is Garmin strategy? Make shit products that are unreliable so the user has to buy/carry more than one?

Oh, and my floptana still refuses to transfer data wirelessly with any other Garmin GPSr. My Oregon 6xx units play nice with each other, but the floptana always times out with a 'lost connection' error.

Yeah, it could just be this one unit, right? Well, Garmin have replaced it three times, so this is my fourth Montana, still with identical issues.

Certainly, I am not suggesting other users are not having great success with their Montana GPSr, just making it clear that there are those of us who are not. Just because yours works great for you does not mean mine works great for me, and vice versa.

The Montana GPSr has seen more firmware revisions than any other Garmin GPSr, ever. It is by far the most frail, most sensitive, and one of the most unreliable GPSr Garmin have produced. My Oregon x50's and my Oregon 6xx's are more reliable than my Montana's, all four of them.

Mines been performing flawlessly packed away in a box for the last 2 months. I've been using the Zumo exclusively since all my riding lately has been street stuff.

I did not mean to imply that my Montana ALWAYS performs flawlessly, just that it does most of the time (except for autorouting; I agree that it's mediocre at that). I have had the exact same issue as above happen randomly once or twice a month for the last year or so. It just goes blank as if the screen timed out but no amount of poking brings it back to life. It has to be re-booted by removing it from the mount and re-mounting it. It has not happened yet while using the just the battery, but I don't hike with it very often. It happens in the truck as well, so I'm sure it's not the loose battery problem. Besides, I have three foam plugs in there.

ONE time last year I was driving when it did this and I just left it as is and after about 20 minutes it just came back on right on my current position on the map as if it had never gone off....:huh VOODOO!!! I've never been patient enough to see if it would ever do that again.

Still, it's so much better than any of my old units that I never use them anymore.

The Montana Wiki is definitely my go-to-source if I need to quickly get facts about common or obscure features of the Montana. It's really well organized and easy to follow.

This thread was great 2 years ago, but the Montana is unlikely to have any new features added or old bugs resolved so it just seems to be the "Montana Chat Room" now.

Probably time to remove the "New" from the heading and move along.

Bob

Mine's been working nicely too. The two most recent map updates added a lot of road speed detail for secondary roads in Canada, and I'm see those often. And the lanes display has worked as well when navigating.

I agree, atlas cache has done a very nice job with his "wiki's".

You might want to check back once and a while as I'm not so sure that Garmin has abandoned the Montana with regards to functional updates -- or bug fixes. The Montana is still a very good selling unit. Squeaky wheel gets the attention, eh?

I had similar Route Navigation bar issues with the 2013.40 CNNA update. I had several maps on the Montana at the time. I finally removed all (except the Basemap) maps and rebooted the Montana; twice. Then, I installed from MapInstall the CNNA map only. No more navigation bar issues and my Lane View and Speed Limit came back. YMMV

As I have suggest many times on this forum (and not sarcastically), if something isn't working as it should return it for replacement or refund right away. I know you have done that many times and I would encourage you to continue. I've returned two Montana's for failure to preform myself.

If we are not good consumers, Garmin will continue to produce products that meet their expectations not customers. This group, and forum, do get some attention from Garmin but just complaining here will not get it done. Change only happens when revenue is at risk. JMHO

I'm pretty certain it is out of warranty. I'll have to give them a call this week and see what they say.


I left the thing sitting in my cabin the rest of the week and it dried out and started working again, just had to do a screen calibration on it. I got about halfway home and the screen stopped registering input completely after it restarted at a fuel stop. Fortunately I was on the interstate by that point and knew the way home

I'm sure this very basic but in case it helps someone else.

I noticed lately that I was having a hard time seeing secondary roads.
I am getting old but I was really struggling with the very faint blue lines.

Turns out I had "Shaded Relief" enabled...turned this off and presto I can see again. :eek1

Fred

Just got done with many hours of desert backcountry travel this weekend with another Advrider. I'm beat to hell. The flpotana definitely did not perform flawlessly although I didn't have too many bug problems. Lost the last bit of track log once and a "reboot" cleared it up. Had a funny thing where a hole lot of weird little artifacts showed up on the map. They were little horizontal bars just slightly more grey than the background. They were all the same size, maybe one or two pixels tall by maybe a dozen wide. They just showed up on the map and as I moved away from the spot where they showed up they were lost once they were behind me. Just weird. Other than that I didn't notice other bugs. Didn't experience the losing satellites with a fast map.

Still constantly frustrated by the inability to do finds from the map. No "find near current route" and that it shows the direction to the "finds" as a stupid arrow instead of a numerical bearing which would at least help mitigate not finding near the current route is a joke.

A majority of the adventure was rough which made the touch sensor a hassle. The silly thumbtacks it put on the waypoints in a direct route made it impossible to read their names. I'm not sure who thought those were a good idea. I used a data field to display the next waypoint name which took care of most of the grief caused by the thumbtacks obscuring the names since it's usually the next point I'm interested in. Still it would be nice to be able to jump directly to the active route page when using a direct route and a different dashboard than "nuvi" (e.g. small data fields). Particularly since I had to use the small data fields dashboard so I could see the next waypoint name.

While I know that the lower precision/accuracy is not much of an issue for most of the users here it is for me. I want/need to be able to average a position (averaging is a function the flpotana supports after all) and get close to 1m and I have zero confidence that I'll get that with it. I've got my 76 for that though.

I saw that someone made a thread for flpotana accuracy.


I know I've said it over and over, funny how people don't tell me to take this to another thread, the display is awesome! I never had trouble seeing it. I'm very impressed and I could live with some shortcomings to get the display. Although some of the trails we were on that were in the mapsets (more than half weren't) were hard-to-see thin lines, like the other guy commented on, unless zoomed way in. So that required zooming in and out a lot which wouldn't have been bad if there were fixed function buttons for zooming, but with the touch was a real pain.


Anyway it was a great trip. Saw a lot of very remote backcountry, incredible desert scenery and some challenging trails and navigating. GNSS technology is amazing no matter.

Same here. Today I was in the middle of a route, using what I call "auto" mode that routes highways.
I switched to what I call "ADV" mode, which avoids highways. It crashed in the middle re-calculating the route.

But it rebooted, started up in ADV mode, calculated the route and I continued on my way
Might have lost some of today's history, but I didn't need it anyway.

After reviewing the track logs.... it did drop a section. Mebbe the lost satellite reception bug and I didn't notice? It was an area with relatively clear sky. At least it wasn't tracks that were particularly interesting. Lesson learned, I'm going to run a 76 or a 60 continuously for logging now. Very reliable units and I much prefer one daily file for logs instead of a bunch of files anyway. I've gotten over the notion at least for now, that one unit will be a good do-all anyway...

Actually the problem is that it has much more resolution than accuracy which without filtering makes for a very unfriendly user interface. Yes the 76x handles this interface issue much better but is probably no more accurate. But then only one user on this forum seems to be concerned with accuracy.

Averaging only helps if all errors are truly random and we have no idea if they are.

I don't see any threads on accuracy, what is link?

I hope you're right, Dan.

The guy that runs GPS Review website made this comment in a discussion about the Monterra not long after it was announced:

Interesting.

Bob