Oregon 450 and 550 Beta Includes Daily Track Archiving
Last week’s beta release (3.61) for the Oregon x50 adds some key features for owners of Garmin’s high-end outdoor units, not the least of which is the reintroduction of some tracklog archiving features only available on some of its older handhelds like the GPSMAP 60Csx. The full release notes for this beta include:
- Added Track Archiving
- Added Automatic Shaded Relief option. This setting will disable Shaded Relief when zoomed in.
- Updated map review of tracks and routes. The distance shown is now the distance along the route or track.
- Added additional data to track and route review pages.
- Improved map drawing speed.
Tracklog Archiving
In this release Garmin has spent a considerable amount of time revamping how archiving of the current tracklog works. The current tracklog is the temporary storage where the Oregon keeps its 10,000 most recent tracklog points. Archiving simply gives you the ability to save all or parts of the current tracklog for use later. Manual archiving options have not changed, what we are talking about below is the ability to have the GPS automatically save your tracklog data.
The new software still retains the ability to let your current tracklog grow to 10,000 points. When this happens older tracks will be saved in archive files under /Garmin/GPX/Archive/ . However, instead of being named 1.gpx, 2.gpx, etc these archive files are now named “Auto 08-Jun-10 06.52.50 AM .gpx” and you are limited only by storage available in internal memory. Previously you were limited to 20 archive files.
 Auto Archive Options |
 Archived File List |
The major new enhancement is the ability to have auto archiving run daily or weekly. Under Setup>Tracks>Auto Archive you will find three options: When Full (described above), Daily and Weekly. As soon as you select either the Daily or Weekly option the unit will analyze your current tracklog and break it up into daily or weekly archive files with names like “Day 20-JUN-10 09.46.32 AM.gpx” or “Week 03-JUL-10 08.34.56 AM.gpx”. Thereafter, when you power on you GPS in the morning (daily) or on Sunday (weekly) the archive file will be created for the previous day/week and all of the tracks in the current tracklog will be moved to the archive file. This keeps the clutter down in your current tracklog and provides an easier way to find your tracklogs for a given date.
Unfortunately Garmin did not integrate this feature with the calendar or provide a search by date function so you’ll still need to page through potentially many files to find what you are looking for. Given a working Calendar tool has appeared on the new GPSMAP 62/78 devices I expect we may see integration with the Calendar tool soon.
The final improvement in this area is the ability to view archived tracklogs on the GPS. Under Track Manager you will see a new button called Archived Tracks. Pressing this button will display all of the archive files and allow you select each in order to view the track on the map, check the elevation profile, rename the track, or mark it as a favorite. The latter simply means that the track will get promoted out of the Archive folder up to the Saved (or Favorite) tracks folder: /Garmin/GPX . This will allow you to navigate to the track and permanently show it on the map but it will count against your 200 Saved track limit. Saved tracks can also be Archived which will move them back down into the Archive folder. All of these operations are supported in internal memory, there are no options to move archived tracks to SD card.
Stopwatch Archives
The stopwatch tool also has the ability to create its own copy of the tracklog. Starting the stopwatch will cause it to begin storing a separate copy of the tracklog found in /Garmin/GPX/Archive after you Reset the stopwatch. The file will be named something similar to “Stopwatch 13-MAR-10 08.13.51 AM.gpx” and will contain only tracklog points from when the stopwatch was running — great for recording only the trackpoints you want on that next run, hike or bike. Stopping the stopwatch will stop collection of trackpoints, starting will resume collection in the same file as long as you don’t reset or power off the unit.
Tip: Add the stopwatch dashboard as the Custom>Not Navigating data field to your favorite page (ie. map, compass, odometer) so that you can start and stop a tracklog directly from that page.
In the process of releasing beta 3.61 Garmin has inadvertently removed the ability to change the tracklog color. This issue has been reported to Garmin and should be fixed in the next release.
Automatic Shaded Relief
Shaded relief allows you to more easily visualize terrain on the map page. While it is a helpful feature the dark green colors which Garmin picked to do the shading can dramatically reduce the readability of the screen. We’ve often recommended that users disable shaded relief in a high visibility (daytime use) profile in order to improve the readability of the map page. Automatic shaded relief when enabled (Setup>Map>Advanced Map Setup>Shaded Relief>Auto) will disable shading when you are at zoom level 80′ (20m) and below. I find this helpful but think that the 80′ zoom level is too low for this to phase in. For me something like the 500′ or 800′ level would be more helpful since I find shaded relief most helpful when I’m looking at larger land areas. Better yet, let the user configure the zoom level!
Shaded Relief Options
Updated Track and Route Review Data
I like the changes here. Previously when you selected a route or track under WhereTo? or Track Manager you would see a distance in the bubble at the top of the screen. Many people confused this with the distance of the track when in fact it was the distance from your current location to the “middle” of the track. Now the bubble clearly states the route/track name and the distance of the route or track.
 Track Review |
 Track Details |
Once you select the track or route the details have been enhanced as well. For tracks you see the distance, area, total ascent/descent and min/max elevation. For routes you will see total ascent/descent as well as travel distance and time, it can be on or off road depending on your routing mode.
 Autoroute Review |
 Autoroute Details |
