Skip Oregon Firmware 2.7, Firmware 2.8 Recommended
Last Tuesday Garmin released firmware for both the Oregon and Colorado which seemed to be aimed at providing GB Discoverer support on both platforms prior to the release of the new Garmin cartography product. The Oregon release also added several nice enhancements including date selection for tide and current charts and a battery saver mode. In addition Garmin fixed a few issues introduced in 2.6 and promised some WAAS improvements.
Unfortunately users on the Groundspeak boards quickly reported issues with 3D View and the Relief Shading settings not working properly. As I was about to post a “do not recommend” for the 2.7 firmware, Garmin released 2.8 which fixed the new bugs and included a minor map display control enhancement.
While I haven’t done exhaustive testing I’m going to recommend skipping 2.7 and going straight to 2.8 especially if you are marine user. The battery saver feature seemed like a nice idea but my power measurements only showed about an additional 1-2 hours of battery life (best case) as compared to the existing backlight timeout feature. Garmin tech support confirmed that the battery saver mode just turns off the display when the backlight timeout expires.
Several weeks ago I posted about issues I was having with WAAS/EGNOS performance on both the Colorado and Oregon. I’ve run some WAAS tests on the Oregon with this new firmware and I still do not see any significant improvement in lock times or the ability of the Oregon to hold a WAAS signal under cover. The Colorado is marginally better than the Oregon but the 60CSx is still the standard — it grabs WAAS lock in around 30-60 seconds and it holds signal better under the trees.
There is still one minor new issue with the 2.7/2.8 Oregon firmware, however it is unlikely that most people will ever encounter the problem. If you have the battery saver mode enabled and are approaching a navigation destination sometimes you will be left with an all white screen which does not respond to any touch. Simply let the screen timeout and the display will start working again. There seems to be a bug when the battery saver mode kicks in just as you get an alert that you arriving at destination.
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December 18th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
[...] You Upgrade! Dec.18, 2008 in Garmin Oregon As luck would have it, within hours of posting a recommendation to upgrade to version 2.8 the issues with this new Oregon firmware have started coming in from left and [...]