Review: Garmin GPSMap 60CSx(ZT)

虎行北美

Review: Garmin GPSMap 60CSx


Package contents:

GPSMAP® 60CSx unit
64 MB microSD (aka TransFlash)
USB interface cable
MapSource Trip & Waypoint Manager CD
Lanyard
Owner's Manual
Quick-Start Guide [/list:u]

About this review

Since there are already a lot of excellent reviews for the predecessor GPSMap 60CS, I will focus on the differences between both models. I used both units for one month, comparing them directly to each other. You can see my test setup in the picture below. The 60CS was tested with firmware version 4.0, the 60CSx was tested with firmware versions 2.5 and 2.6.


Test setup for the outdoor tests. 60CS to the left, 60CSx to the right.



Reception:

My first impressions of the 60CSx were very good. It took the device less than a minute to get a perfect fix on about 10 satellites. After another three minutes, every bar in the satellite page showed a little "D" indicating that EGNOS/WAAS data had been received for that satellite. The receiver reported an accuracy of 3 meters (10 feet). This was impressive, but the conditions were quite good. It is more interesting to see how the device performs in bad conditions.

In the cellar of my house, the device can still receive 3 to 6 satellites through its two windows. The accuracy is reported with about 14 meters (46 feet), but is a little bit jumpy. My old 60CS receives zero to one satellite at the same location. The first hard real world test was a geocaching trip into a city (Mainz) with narrow street and urban canyons. My old 60CS had a bad and jumpy position fix. From time to time, it even lost the signals completely. The new one still had 7 or 8 satellites and allowed me to find a cache hidden in a urban backyard easily. The reported accuracy was 6 meters (20 feet) and the position was quite stable (not jumpy).

The pictures below show both units side by side at various places. Note that in all cases, the 60CSx receives more satellites than the 60CS (I am sorry for swapping the units in the first picture):



The reception of both units compared indoors inside our living room.



…outdoors in our backyard with good but not perfect sky view.



The reception of both units inside a car at a gas station (under a roof).



Another geocaching trip brought me to some natural canyons in the forest (in the German Taunus area) with heavy canopy. My predecessors reported that they had very bad reception and difficulties finding the cache. Indeed, the 60CS only had between 2 and 4 satellites and a very bad jumpy fix with about 17 meters (56 feet) estimated accuracy. The 60CSx was able to receive 9 satellites resulting in an estimated accuracy of 6 meters (20 feet). It was quite easy to find the cache, since the 60CSx pointed about 2 meters left to the cache.

Even if I equip my old 60CS with an external antenna from Gilsson, the reception is not as good as with the new 60CSx. The 60CSx still has a few more satellites resulting in a slightly better position estimation. Another point is that the 60CSx "finds" the satellites nearly instantly after they reappear, e.g. when leaving a long tunnel. My old 60CS often had problems to find the satellites after a tunnel in a big city with urban canyons, what can be very annoying when you use it for routing.

The following pictures show tracklogs recorded by both units during that geocaching trip, and in all cases, the tracklog recorded by the 60CSx matches the track or road much better:



Geocaching in the Taunus. GPS signal reception is degraded in wet forest canopy.
The tracklog recorded by the 60CSx (green) matches the track much better.



Geocaching in the Taunus again. GPS signal reception is degraded in wet forest canopy.
The tracklog recorded by the 60CSx (green) matches the track much better.



…narrow streets in the mountains of the Taunus.
The tracklog recorded by the 60CSx (green) matches the road much better.


One day I was on a business trip to Bonn with the German high speed train ICE, which has those shiny, reflecting, heat shielded windows. The 60CSx was able to get a weak fix with 3 to 4 satellites. The signals were very weak according to very small satellite bars in the display. The accuracy was between 10 and 40 meters (between 33 and 131 feet), and sometimes reception was lost altogether. My old 60CS was not able to find even a single satellite during that train trip, which was my previous experience with that type of windows.

I conclude that in almost any situation, GPS reception with the 60CSx is much better than with the 60CS. On the one hand, this results in more precise positioning under all conditions, which is in particular valuable for geocaching. On the other hand, you can use the 60CSx under difficult conditions where the 60CS has problems, for example, when autorouting in urban or natural canyons.



Pros:

The biggest improvement after the great reception is the ability to use micro SD cards (also known as TransFlash) as map storage. I bought a 512 MB card at amazon.de for 32 Euros. 512 MB is more than enough space to store the German map set, which uses 324.7 MB with City Select version 7. A German chart which shows the required capacity for different European countries can be found here. For me, the increase in available storage is a big plus, since I also use the device for autorouting.

Another very big improvement is that maps are displayed/redrawn much faster. I did some measurements to find out how much faster the 60CSx is compared to the 60CS. More precisely, I measured the time in seconds it takes the devices to draw maps at various zoom levels, with different detail levels and different map products. All tests showed that the 60CSx is 2.4 to 2.8 times faster than the 60CS in displaying/redrawing maps! You notice that when you change the zoom levels, forcing the map to be redrawn. But you also notice the difference in performance and speed when scrolling/panning the map. When I pan the map with my old 60CS, the screen gets blank after panning one screen, because the device is too slow to redraw in real-time. I have to stop panning, wait for some seconds until the screen is redrawn, and then I can continue panning. This property makes it very difficult to plan a route (e.g. on the topo map) if it does not fit on one screen. The new 60CSx is able to redraw the screen in real-time while scrolling/panning the map. This is an incredible improvement, since one can now plan a route on the display of the GPS very comfortably, whereas on the 60CS, this was a real pain. To illustrate the difference I made a little video showing both units while panning the map: panning_video_60CSx_vs_60CS.avi (14MB).

The 60CSx is now compatible with the Garmin POI Loader. The POI Loader enables you to load as many points as you like into the device as long as the SD card has enough space. I loaded about 22000 POIs (geocaches, post boxes, ATM terminals, castles, etc.) into the 60CSx, which take 1.8 MB of space. You can define as much categories as you want. Each category can have a user defined icon, but the icon is not drawn in the current version of the firmware. Moreover, you can set a proximity and/or a speed warning for each category. In contrast to the 60CS, there is no upper limit to the amount of proximity warnings. Each POI can have a name of 44 characters and a description of 88 characters. I did not observe a performance decrease after loading thousands of POIs or loading the entire memory card with map data.

The 60CSx is now able to draw power from the USB cable. This is comfortable, since my batteries are not used if the device is attached to the computer for some time. Now you can also use a cheap adapter for your cigarette lighter in the car which provides a powered USB port.

Waypoint names can now have up to 14 mixed case characters. The 60CS was limited to 10 characters, uppercase only. The 60CSx also offers more characters. You can now use character such as ä, ö, ü, ß, <, $, and many more which were not available for waypoint names in the 60CS (see pictures below).




Cons:

I noticed that the icons I was used to are replaced with comic style icons. I liked the old ones much better, but I can get used to the new ones. Perhaps a patch of the firmware can bring back the old ones…

Main menu 60CS


Setup menu 60CS


Main menu 60CSx


Setup menu 60CSx



Compared to my 60CS bought in August of 2004, the buttons are worse. The keystroke feels softer and is not as clearly defined as on my old 60CS. I preferred the old buttons, because you could feel much better that a button was pressed. But this is no difference between the 60CS and the 60CSx, since I noticed that newer version of the 60CS have the same fuzzy keystroke as my 60CSx. After about four weeks, I am getting used to the new buttons.

In contrast to the 60CS, there is no alarm clock, no pressure trend recording and no DGPS via the serial port. The languages you can select are limited to the main languages spoken in the area of the base map of the device. The US model allows you to choose between English, French, Spanish and Portuguese. Someone wrote a patch for the firmware to allow the selection of other languages too, but for me, English is just fine.

Garmin claims that the battery life is about 10% less compared to the 60CS. I did some tests and measured the battery life under real usage conditions. All tests had the same result: the battery life of the 60CSx is 30% less compared to the 60CS. Without using the backlight or the electronic compass I measured 27 hours and 42 minutes for the 60CS and 19 hours and 23 for the 60CSx (30% less). With using the backlight for about half of the time at 50% and occasional use of the compass I measured 19:31 for the 60CS and 13:17 for the 60CSx (32% less). I used rechargeable batteries from Ansmann with a capacity of 2600mAh for all the tests.





Differences in Autorouting:

The 60CSx calculates routes about twice as fast as the 60CS. My test route had 26 turns over a distance of 234 kilometers. The 60CS took 39.4 seconds for that test, the 60CSx was finished after only 18.8 seconds, which is little bit more than twice as fast. This test was done with the calculation method "best route", but other tests with different setting showed the same results. Calculation speed is very important if you miss a turn and the device has to perform a recalculation. The 60CSx performs a recalculation much earlier: If you miss a turn, the 60CSx recalculates at about half of the distance before the 60CS starts a recalculation. This is very useful since it greatly reduces the chance that you miss the next turn.

All turn warnings are presented much later than on the 60CS. Here is a comparison chart:

Road type indicated by speed 60 CSx early 60CSx final 60 CS early 60CS final
30 Km/h                      20 sec       5 sec     30 sec    12 sec
50 Km/h                      20 sec       5 sec     30 sec    12 sec
80 Km/h                      30 sec       7 sec     65 sec    20 sec
110 Km/h                    52 sec      10 sec     90 sec   20 sec


I personally like the later turn warnings at lower speed in the city better than the earlier warnings on the 60CS. But I think the final warning on the highway (110 Km/h) is too short with only 10 seconds. Maybe this is changed in future firmware versions.

The 60CSx assumes different speeds for autorouting. Compared to the 60CS the 60CSx prefers roads through cities a little bit more. I retrieved the speeds for different road types by watching the demos modes of both devices. Empirical tests showed that these are the speeds the GPS receiver assumes you drive on a certain road type. These values may change with future firmware version. The were observed with firmware version 4.0 of the 60CS and firmware version 2.5 and 2.6 of the 60CSx.


Road type indicated by speed Speed 60CSx Speed 60CS
30 Km/h 35.0 Km/h 32.2 Km/h
50 Km/h 52.0 Km/h 48.3 Km/h
80 Km/h 75.7 Km/h 86.9 Km/h
100 Km/h 101.0 Km/h 103.0 Km/h
110 Km/h 109.0 Km/h 113.0 Km/h
more than 110 Km/h 118.0 Km/h 129.0 Km/h


Some guidance texts are different. At a certain highway junction the 60CS prompts: "Keep left to Darmstädter Kreuz" (Darmstädter Kreuz is the name of the junction), whereas the 60CSx says: "Keep left on E35" (E35 is the name of the highway you should stay on). At another highway junction the 60CS reports: "Keep left to Raunheim" (Raunheim is actually the city I came from, so I find this one very confusing), and the 60CSx tells me to "Keep left to E35" (E35 is the name of the highway I should turn on). I like the new guidance texts a little bit better, because they are less confusing. Please note that both units were using the European CitySelect version 7.



Bugs and Problems:

It happened two or three times in the last month that the 60CSx was not able to get a fix within several minutes. I turned GPS reception off and on in the satellite page which let the 60CSx acquire satellites in a few seconds.

A friend of mine has a similar, but more serious problem. When driving through a tunnel, his unit predictably loses satellite reception and gets it back on exit, but only for something between a second and a minute. Then the unit loses satellite reception altogether, in spite of excellent conditions. In this situation, only the off/on trick can make it work again. After updating to firmware version 2.6, the problem persists.
The following video shows my friend's 60CSx next to mine while driving through the tunnel, and only his device (on the right) fails: garmin_60Csx_reception_failure.avi (13MB).

It happened several times that I forgot to turn off the 60CSx when I entered a building (e.g. a restaurant) during a day trip. I have set my tracklog recording to "most often". Together with the jumpy reception in building, this results in a new track point recorded every few seconds. Staying two hours in a restaurant can cost you several thousand points of the tracklog memory. Once I lost 8000 points in about three hours. You loose much less points if you set the recording to "more often" or "normal", but the problem is still there. After 4 weeks of using the new model I got used to turn it of inside a building to save tracklog memory.
The situation is much better if you have at least a fair reception. The 60CSx recorded 121 points (see the picture of the tracklog below) after sitting in my office near the window for 1 hour and 24 minutes with recording mode set to "most often". It "traveled" 493 meters during that period, which is acceptable considering the poor reception.




This one is not really a bug, but its worth mentioning: Tracklog memory consumption is much higher compared to the 60CS. Look at the tracklog pictures above to see the difference. Both units were set to "auto mode" and "most often".

It happened three or four times that the altimeter showed a reading of 30000 meters. When I checked the tracklog later at home on the PC, I saw that at some point of the trip, the recorded altitude jumped to 30000. A friend of mine observed the same behavior. The problem still occurs with version 2.6 of the firmware.

As I mentioned before, the icons transferred by the POI Loader are not displayed on the 60CSx.

Also, find by name doesn't work with the custom POIs.

Moreover, panning the map and performing a search at the position of the cursor does not work with custom POIs. The displayed distance refers to the current position instead of the cursor's position.

It happened five times during the last four weeks that the 60CSx suddenly shut down. The hidden debug menu (press up, right, down, left in trip computer) indicates that there was a "data abort" (see the screen shot below), whatever that means.




In my opinion, almost all these problems are caused by software bugs that can and will be fixed by Garmin in future firmware version. My experience is that Garmin takes reports such as these seriously.



Pros:



much better reception
ability to use micro SD cards for map storage
much faster redrawing/panning of maps
much faster route calculation
ability to load a unlimited amount of own points using the POI Loader
Longer names for waypoints with lower case characters
power via USB [/list:u]


Cons:


30% less battery life
keystroke feels less precise (applies to newer 60CS models too)
missing alarm clock and pressure trend recording
no DPGS input via serial port
language selection is limited to main languages spoken in the area of the base map
still some bugs in the firmware (version 2.5 and 2.6)
comic style icons [/list:u]



Conclusion:

Overall, the 60CSx has many pros and not so many cons compared to the 60CS. The 60CS is already a very good GPS receiver, but I very much prefer the even better 60CSx. I consider none of the drawbacks/bugs critical or unnerving. Accordingly, I highly recommend the device to anybody, no matter if you consider upgrading from the 60CS or if you plan to buy your first GPS receiver.

熊大肠

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