Garmin Quest 2 - First Impressions

[Sidmariner]

Just finished another 5 day roadtrip and gave the Quest 2 another chance.

Same issues prevail, slow, awkward and near useless in a pinch. Entire road networks are missing in the Caribou region of BC. (Try driving from 150 Mile House to Horsefly Lake). I hated trying to plan routes with it.

In my last post I mentioned how its battery would die without warning. I thought the problem was the cig-plug, so I replaced it for this trip. Same thing happened, so I now think the pickups on the back of the unit are the fault. If I wiggled the unit in the cradle it would brighten up and start charging. Despite cleaning the contacts on the cradle and the unit it continued to, well... not continue, and would die without warning. After a night long charging on the bike while stopped it would work for a few hours in the morning and go black. I tried picking up the power from three separate outlets on the bike but the result was always the same.

So, if the units blacks out while you're burning the miles and then it comes alive in the morning are the tripmeter values actually of any value? I suspect not.

I remain convinced this is a farkle best left on the shelf.

[Ogsarg]

Originally Posted by Sidmariner

Just finished another 5 day roadtrip and gave the Quest 2 another chance.

Same issues prevail, slow, awkward and near useless in a pinch. Entire road networks are missing in the Caribou region of BC. (Try driving from 150 Mile House to Horsefly Lake). I hated trying to plan routes with it.

In my last post I mentioned how its battery would die without warning. I thought the problem was the cig-plug, so I replaced it for this trip. Same thing happened, so I now think the pickups on the back of the unit are the fault. If I wiggled the unit in the cradle it would brighten up and start charging. Despite cleaning the contacts on the cradle and the unit it continued to, well... not continue, and would die without warning. After a night long charging on the bike while stopped it would work for a few hours in the morning and go black. I tried picking up the power from three separate outlets on the bike but the result was always the same.

So, if the units blacks out while you're burning the miles and then it comes alive in the morning are the tripmeter values actually of any value? I suspect not.

I remain convinced this is a farkle best left on the shelf.

Before you give up on it, I'd give Garmin Tech support a chance and see what they can do. On a GPS site I've looked at, there are repeated issues of bad cradles that don't make contact or make intermittent contact with the quest. I suspect that is your problem with the unit shutting off and they will likely send you a new cradle no questions asked.

Probably can't do much about not showing roads though as the map data all comes from a 3rd party who is also the source for all the other GPS companies.

Now that I have one I see it's limitations, but I also see it being very handy.

[zx-greg]

In my last post I mentioned how its battery would die without warning. I thought the problem was the cig-plug, so I replaced it for this trip. Same thing happened, so I now think the pickups on the back of the unit are the fault. If I wiggled the unit in the cradle it would brighten up and start charging. Despite cleaning the contacts on the cradle and the unit it continued to, well... not continue, and would die without warning. After a night long charging on the bike while stopped it would work for a few hours in the morning and go black. I tried picking up the power from three separate outlets on the bike but the result was always the same.

Same thing happened to me on my Magellan Meridian. I would suddenly go to battery power. Unforunately this unit (it's my 3rd unit -- not Magellan's fault) drains its batteries on a bike in about 1 hour (v. over 12 hours hiking).

Although I assumed it was a bad wiring job on my part to a homemade power plug I realized it was the contacts at the unit itself. I think the problem is that the unit is weatherproof but the contacts are not. In spite of the power plug sitting underneath the unit, it still gets wet.

[Ogsarg]

Originally Posted by gar01821

The Quest 2 firmware upgrade from version 2.4 to 2.5 or 2.6 dramatically slows the down the unit to the point where it will:
1. Loose satellite lock, so the unit will often not know where it is.
2. When auto routing, the unit will not automatically scale up to a larger map size about 70 % of the time.
3. Slow the refresh of maps to a point where the screen will stay blank for up to 40 seconds.
When I when back to firmware version 2.4 all the issues went away.

As to using Mapsource on your PC, call Garmin and request a DVD of the NT version. They will send it to you.

I was looking at trying to go back to 2.4 but don't see anyway to download anything other than the current rev. How did you do it?

[V scooter]

has any one tryed the tom tom some one told me they make one for a motorcycle now? i have a tom tom 300 that i use for my RV and love it i can set diffrent tone on it which tell me if its gas,camp grounds etc. i also like that if you have a cell phone that is internet ready it will give you up to date traffic info and reroute you automaticly and your phone plug right into the gps .i also like the day and nite auto screen function diffrent colors and the 3 D mapping is cool, it looks as if your driving down the road instead of the 2D over head veiw that all the others have it still has the 2D veiw if you want it even has a route demo that you run to see if you like the route you chose or not ,i also have a cobra 1000 gps it work ok but love the tom tom

[gar01821]

Originally Posted by Ogsarg

I was looking at trying to go back to 2.4 but don't see anyway to download anything other than the current rev. How did you do it?

go to http://www.gpsinformation.org/perry/quest/ and download Quest2_240