New eTrex Followup

In my last post, I promised that I would follow up on the pros and cons of the new Garmin eTrex SE vs old Garmin eTrex 10.

As I mentioned, the deal breaker for us is that despite deselecting the settings option to stop recording when the device is stationary, it has no (detectable to me) effect. This makes our birch forest visualisations inaccurate because when we are down the garden or sitting in a park outside with friends, we want that information recorded and counted when we eventually make our carpets or visualisations of our time spent outside (i.e. recorded with a GPS) and inside (no record).

One could argue that the weakness lies in us conflating these two disparate definitions of activity (having a GPS record means we’re outside and having no record means we’re inside) but I would counter that I, as the user, get to define the behaviour of my equipment. If I explicitly tell the GPS to keep recording, I do not expect it to ‘usefully’ stop recording. I don’t care if the device is moving or not and nor should the device.

Of course this could be a firmware issue that gets sorted in a future update but I doubt it and I don’t want to lose precious data in the mean time. Incidentally, another setting option that doesn’t seem to work is the one labelled ‘Restart recording automatically’. When I set the device to save a new file every day, the first time I started the device in the morning, I had to ‘Resume’ track recording manually as it was on ‘pause’. A couple of times I forgot of course, losing more data. I now set it to make a new file each week. I don’t trust ‘automatic’.

A ‘pro’ that has emerged is very much improved battery life. I was at first excited that the device is capable of receiving Gps, Glonass, Galileo and Beidou GNSS systems, it doesn’t seem more accurate than the old eTrex 10s. In fact, I suspect that improved battery life has resulted in a degradation of position accuracy over time.

Oh well, back to ebay / kleinanzeigen to look for old eTrex 10s I suppose. Not ultimately sustainable, but OK for now. I’m sad to report that in this respect, Garmin is another example of the march towards the enshittification of everything.