I’ve bought a Garmin Oregon 600 a few weeks back. It’s got Firmware v3.90. I’ve tried turning Glonass on and off and EGNOS on and off and it’s always quite inaccurate. See these examples, my Oregon 600, mounted on my bike handle (green) vs. OSM track data from the respective area (pink):
I’ve have both the 450 and 600 and both can be very accurate or not at all. There is a feature that tells you the accuracy of your reception - often mine is around 5 metres . In my experience ,thick cloud cover can have quite an effect and interestingly, when its ‘warmed up’ the accuracy increases.
Don’t expect accuracy of any gps device to be always within 1 metre!
Yes, of course, but look at the samples linked how far it is beyond the average (and even the extremes) of all the other devices that went along the same routes during the time that OSM exists. And we’re talking 10 to 50 metres constantly off here.
Also I thought that the accurateness of a 600 is worse than that of the 400. I did not do a really “fair” comparison between both devices, once I had the 600 mounted on the bike stirring bar, and the 400 in a bag on the rear of the bike. Sometimes the 400 was more accurate, sometimes the 600 - but the position on the stirring bar is likely a better position. for GPS reception Overall, I think now that accurateness is rather similar.
But beware of other “features” of the 600: starting the device may take some 3 (!) minutes. A screen with just the Garmin logo on it may be visible for more than 1 minute, only thereaftern the copyright notice etc are shown on the lower end of the screen.
Also, I found some kind of Bermuda Triangle: in about 50% of the times I travelled thru this roundabout http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/39.81499/3.11424 , the device crashed and had to be started again.
And beware of “activity routing”: the tools available for OSM do not support activity routing. Your car could be routed along footways - unless you prepare your maps yourself and make sure that all ways not usable for cars are outside the routable codes, also dealing with all those “access” tags etc (then you cannot use the map for bike routing).
Anyway, have fun!
