Colorado still drifts, Oregon joins in on the fun
After testing the Garmin Colorado with the new GPS Firmware 2.8 for about a week I have been seeing some promising results. Day after day the Colorado was performing at or above the level of the 60csx over my test course with nothing more than a few very minor 30′-40′ drifts, certainly well within the expected accuracy of the GPS. That is until a couple of days ago when the Colorado wandered about 150′ off course. I was interrupted in the middle of the drift and stopped for about 5 minutes while I talked to a friend. During my stop the drift recovered in about 1-2 minutes. This might suggest that 2.8 is still an improvement over 2.6 which took 15-20 minutes to recover at times. The image to the left shows the blue Colorado track and where the drift reached the maximum from the yellow reference track.
I’m not quite sure what to make of this yet but I’ll be continuing to test to see if this was a one time occurrence or if we are back to the 2.6 firmware behavior.
I happened to have the Oregon along on the same test (shown by the green track log) and it is interesting to note the behavior of the Oregon compared to the Colorado when stationary. The image to the right is zoomed in where I stopped and the Colorado recovered. The Oregon drifts very little when stopped, you can see the Colorado danced around quite a bit near the same location.
Not to be outdone by the Colorado, my Oregon 400t also decided to drift on another of my recent test runs. I’ve seen this once before on the Oregon, but in over 50-60 tests it has been much less frequent than the Colorado.
I guess at the end of the day you have to accept that this is going to happen with any consumer unit, although the 60csx has always been very reliable in my testing and is still the benchmark. I definitely feel that with 2.6 the Colorado was too unpredictable, I literally had days go by where I couldn’t get a solid test. If it turns out to be a fairly infrequent event and the magnitude of the drift is less than 100-150′ I can live with it. What it comes down is whether you trust the GPS you are using and while the Colorado was gaining some steady ground over the past week I’m now back to second guessing it. Guess which unit I grab when I go geocaching or hiking?
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