Garmin's Foretrex
For some time now I have a Garmin Foretrex 201 GPS unit, mainly to have some fun while hiking and to have fun afterwards looking at the tracks we made. After some nine months of usage it is time to make up the balance. All in all I’m really pleased with the Foretrex, apart from one not so minor problem. It just works and doesn’t get in the way.
The Foretrex is small and simple so it wears easily on the wrist. I’ve found this to be really useful for quick glances while hiking more difficult parts of a track, where it would be a pain to get out a unit from a pocket. The Foretrex doesn’t handle downloadable maps, but that was never an issue for me anyway, I’d rather get the smaller size unit and carry a real map in addition to it. It does have all the other things that make a GPS unit useful: waypoints, routes, and tracks. Most of the displays can be customized so that it is easy to show all relevant information in one go.
The one problem that I have with the Foretrex is that it started to behave strangely after some 6 months of use. The unit was turned on, and could not be turned off. It seemed as if the power button was permanently engaged. After turning the unit in under warranty it was not really fixed. Garmin had loaded new software on the device, and the problem was not so apparent anymore, but it had not gone away completely and got worse over time again. Interestingly, it then switched to not being able to load at all instead of being turned on all the time. The breaking point for me came when I was on a hiking trip and could not load the unit at all.
The Foretrex comes with a special clamp with connectors for serial and power. The clamp can be taken off so that there are no exposed areas on the Foretrex which makes it resistant to water. Opening up the clamp revealed the problem. As can be seen in the more detailed photo below, the power connector (on the right) has a small pin that inserts into the plug at one end. Because of this quite a bit of pressure can be put on it when the plug is not inserted exactly right. The other side of the pin, visible in the photo, is soldered onto the board, but that is not a very strong connection. Indeed, making sure that the pin-end connects to the board at the right place makes my unit load without any problems. Moving it around makes the earlier symptoms very easy to reproduce. Looks like a bit of faulty engineering to me, but at least I am now able to load the unit again.
