Captain Ron's

Sailing and Cruising Pages

Garmin Rant

by Capt Ron

Did you ever get the feeling that we’re all lab rats and that modern technology (I’m speaking here of the electronic variety) is the food pellets?

Here’s a new movie on DVD for you…. Pop it into your DVD player and it works fine no big deal. BUT pop the same DVD into a PC that is “DVD compatible” and it won’t simply play … first you have to install the publisher’s version of player software. WHY you ask??? Well kemo sabe; it's because the DVD publisher doesn’t want to pay Microsoft for the rights to the player version of Microsoft’s DVD Player … so he invents his own… and we get to install another piece of junk software on our laptop ... Lab rats

Navigation software is even worse… first let’s take the ubiquitous Garmin GPS … used to be fairly useful as a navigation tool back when it just gave you your lat/long but since they’ve figured out new markets for GPS information, the basic navigation functions have taken a back seat. In fact, I’ll bet that the moron programmer of Garmin Nav functions has never even been on a boat, let alone tried to use his software to navigate by it.

For example … enter a route … a basic use of a route would be sailboat racing… i.e. the boats go around mark 1, proceed to mark 2, round it to starboard, proceed to mark 3, etc… an ideal application of routes, NO?

Well actually no, Garmin's route software assumes that you would never go to the same mark twice and so routes cannot be established where you round buoy A twice in the same route…so you therefore must invent fake waypoints (a few feet apart) with different names so that you can return to a waypoint that you’ve already passed…lab rats.

Now, you’ve programmed in all the waypoints you need and you’re ready to start the race … bang the gun goes off … you look at the GPS which should be showing the route to the weather mark right? Wrongo… it’s showing you the route to the jibe mark … why you ask? Well that’s because you've started down at the far end of the line and the GPS assumes that you wanted to go to the nearest mark, which happens to be the jibing mark.

OK… so then you get the bright idea that what we need to do is capture the starting line as the first mark…the you realize a line is defined by two points… how exactly can the GPS understand two points as the starting point? It can’t so you settle for the mid point of the line as the starting point of your route. Now you get the idea that hey this thing should tell me how far I am from the starting line right? Well no, not if you programmed the starting point into a route and activated the route … the GPS is not programmed to tell you how far “behind” the line you are … if you are leaving a mark it assumes that you’ve passed that mark and now you must want to go to the next mark (sometimes the nearest mark) … yikes … lab rats.

Alright two down, let's try this. We're beating up the windward leg and you would like to know your VMG to the weather mark. Well, they said the thing would do that so you find a way to display VMG. Now we're heading up the windward leg pointing high and going fast, riding a nice lift toward the layline on the left side of the course ... hey wait a minute, the VMG is dropping, but we're riding a lift?? What gives? ... Well it turns out that VMG isn't a true VMG at all ... it's a geometric VMG which means that VMG drops as you move away from the rhumb line course. In fact it drops to zero at the layline and gets negative as you over-stand the windward mark ... Of course, if you tack right on th layline then the you are on the straight line course to the mark and VMG will now be equal to your speed. I suppose it's useful on the last tack of the leg if you want to judge the geometric layline ...

Attempting to interface your GPS to a Charting software package is full of holes too. A tip off is that when you first set up your GPS to interface to your PC Chart software and you can”t find your GPS model listed in the setup menu …this usually means that while you may actually get a NMEA stream to feed position data to the charts and display your position in real time, you probably won’t have any other features … i.e. you won’t be able to plan routes on your computer and transfer them to the GPS for example … Garmin in their infinite wisdom has made some models of GPS require the use of Garmin PC charting software … a proprietary interface program …. Thank you Garmin …you just lost another lab rat.

Assuming you're using a GPS model that is specified in the Chart software's set-up menu, you'll be lucky if you get anything to work at all. I have both Fugawi and Maptech's Offshore Navigator and both list my old trusty Garmin GPS 48 in the set-p menu ... I can't make the thing work. In fact if I specify the GPS 48, the thing crashes my computer. Probably has something to do with the serial-to-USB adapter. The GPS 48 was designed for a serial port connection and my PC doesn't have a serial port so the adapter is required. However, if I set-up the Garmin and Maptech to use the NMEA protocol, it will interface properly albeit without the ability to transfer data back and forth. See how one technology obsoletes another? I told you we were lab rats.

Of course, if you can't move planned routes and waypoints back and forth between the GPS and the computer storage base, you will need plenty of storage in the GPS ... one would think that 250 waypoints and 20 routes would be sufficient. It is if you never go anywhere beyond a day's sail of your home port. For the rest of us, we find that we quickly run out of waypoint storage and well with only 20 routes we learn to plan way in advance and combine routes so that we can just use segments. It's either that or you end up deleting routes... which you end up re-keying next year when you pass this way again.

The track feature is useful too but once again, if you can't transfer route data to the PC or back again, you quickly run out of internal GPS storage. Tracks on a fine interval, say every 2 boat lengths , give you excellent means of navigating tricky inlets and such once you've been through there. Unfortunately, my Garmin craps out after about the first thousand breadcrumbs. So for example, my breadcrumbs from entering and leaving Abraham's Bay on Mayaguana last year are now lost ... have to do it the hard way, again.

Of course, the expensive Garmin GPS chart plotter that we steer by, uses something called mini G chart cartridges. These are no longer available or supported by Garmin. Even when they were available, they charged ridiculous amounts of cash for them. It used to cost $200 just for the Northern half of the Chesapeake. A boat cruising he east coast, Florida, and Bahamas would have a small fortune in chart cartridges. Used ones sometimes come up on EBay but still prices run high as I guess many yachtsmen have been stuck with these otherwise perfectly useful GPS-Chart machines.

For my next GPS, I will spend a great deal of research and energy to find one that interacts well with Maptech and this lab rat won't be looking at a Garmin product for the first time in 15 years.