Is it just me?

[Lootas1]

I'm old but I deny being senile. However, I can't make heads or tails out of electronic devices. Just bought an Eagle fish finder and a Garmin hand held GPS to use with my old boat. I read the comments of people who bought them and they were doing wonderful things with them.
I installed my fish finder and one of the first things I tried to do was set the bottom alarm. I had the book in hand and followed step by step. Got to where it said I could set the minimum depth by using the up and down arrows. It was set at zero and couldn't be changed. Although there was 5 feet of water under the boat (as the fish finder recorded and I could see by looking over the side), the alarm began beeping as soon as I hit "enable". It kept it up while I kept trying to change the alarm setting. (Shouldn't it have been quiet if the alarm was supposed to go off when I reached zero feet of water?) After many minutes with no change, I found where I could select "beep" or "song". I decided to see what "song" it would sing. So, I highlighted "song" and "enable" but it just kept beeping. So, I went to volume and shut the sound off. Now it is quiet but I have no bottom alarm.
So, I turned to my new toy, a Garmin GPSMap 76. Turned it on and it found satellites. So far so good. It said I could learn to use it in the simulation mode. Now we are getting somewhere! Soon it too wasn't showing what the book said it should be showing and I decided I must take it out of the Simulation Mode and go out on the briny and learn to use it. That didn't work, either. After 8-10 hours of messing with it, I guess I'll return it. Perhaps I'm just too old to learn or maybe the guys who write the manuals don't actually see if what they write has anything to do with the device they are describing.

 

[Bob_VT]

Re: Is it just me?

As far as the garmin..... yes there is a learning curve. I usually sugget to people to find a big area at least 1/2 mile square and play with the garmin. See how it stores waypoints and how it directs you.

Technically the garmin will always plot a straight line route wich confuses people. You just have to learn to manipulate it and read it. LOL when I purchased my first Garmin 12 I was always tempted to throw it away until I figured it out. I carried a compass as a backup.

 

[jay_merrill]

Re: Is it just me?

Don't give up yet. I have a basic Garmin handheld GPS too - mine is an ETrex, which does not have the mapping function that yours does. The reason for the simulation mode, is that GPS reception is "line of sight," meaning that the unit can't pickup satelite signals inside of a building, under a large canopy, etc. Having the simulation mode lets you sit in your house to practice with it. When you are outside, however, you don't need to use it.

While your unit is somewhat different than mine, I think you will find that playing with the various buttons will give you a sense of what each one does. There really aren't all that many functions in the unit, so you will begin to recognize patterns, as to what happens when you use each button. One will move you through various "main menus," another will move you up and down through a menu or a selection of letters or numbers, another will "enter" a selection, and so forth.

Try reading your manual one section at a time. As you do, perform the functions being described. I think I am kinda like you when it comes to technical manuals - when I know nothing of the piece of gear, it all seems like Greek to me. When I tie actual use of the gear with the instructions, however, it all seems to make sense.

Having now given you a little bit of a primer on a Garmin GPS, let me suggest that you read through some of the threads in the "Electrics, Electronic and Trolling Motors" section, here at the iboats forums. Do a search on "Garmin" and you will most likely find a number of informative threads. You can also begin a thread of your own.

 

[v1_0]

Re: Is it just me?

Perhaps I'm just too old to learn or maybe the guys who write the manuals don't actually see if what they write has anything to do with the device they are describing.

I see this all the time in the software industry. The problem is that the user/usage manuals are written by someone that reads the technical manuals (but may have never even seen the product).

The technical manuals are started before the product is made to describe kinda sorta how we are going to do things. Then, hopefully, they are updated when the product goes into testing with how things ended up working. Finally, they should be brought up-to-date after testing has finished - with all the things that changed during testing (to fix issues).

But, at least in software, the development arm of things isn't 'paid' to write documenation. That's the job of the technical writers... Sometimes (often) there are breaks in communication.

On the other end of the scale, the documentation gets written by technical writers that are very familiar with the product - at the expert level - and even when they 'dumb it down', they end up leaving out all the little steps that they do without thinking about them. The reviewers are also at the same level of expertise, so they don't think about those steps either. You, of course, haven't developed the habit of performing those little steps (because you don't even know about them) so have problems...

Finally, there is the outsourcing of documents. It is cheaper to write documents in India, or maybe even China. "Indian English" was derived from British English, as was "North American English". However, they are parallel branches with their own eccentricities and have been affected by the local conditions as well. Things sometimes don't mean quite the same in each branch...

 

[JB]

Re: Is it just me?

Learning a modern SONAR and a modern GPS from scratch all at once is enough to scare a genius, Lootas.

Take it one small step at a time. Get the SONAR to tell you how deep the water is, and settle for that for a while.

Get the GPS to tell you where you are now.

After you are comfortable with those for a fews days, think about one more thing to get from each.

Most of us learned SONAR starting with units that gave depth and did nothing else, and GPS that gave location and little else.

Operating either of those units at the limits of their capability is sort of like going from band-aids to neurosurgery overnight.

I have had my Garmin 276C for about 6 years and still don't know how to do maybe 40% of what it could do if I wanted it to.

I may forget to zip my fly once in a while, but that doesn't mean we are senile.

 

[tashasdaddy]

Re: Is it just me?

all the more reason to take a grandson fishing.

 

[Shizzy]

Re: Is it just me?

Learning a modern SONAR and a modern GPS from scratch all at once is enough to scare a genius, Lootas.

Take it one small step at a time. Get the SONAR to tell you how deep the water is, and settle for that for a while.

Get the GPS to tell you where you are now.

After you are comfortable with those for a fews days, think about one more thing to get from each.

Most of us learned SONAR starting with units that gave depth and did nothing else, and GPS that gave location and little else.

Operating either of those units at the limits of their capability is sort of like going from band-aids to neurosurgery overnight.

I have had my Garmin 276C for about 6 years and still don't know how to do maybe 40% of what it could do if I wanted it to.

I may forget to zip my fly once in a while, but that doesn't mean we are senile.

sound advice. Im usually pretty good at figuring devices out but it did tale me a few outings to figure out all the details on my very simple finder (Eagle Cuda 242)

 

[woosterken]

Re: Is it just me?

check with garmin and eagle f/f to see if they have a DVD guide for your things.
I found a DVD guide for my GPS 72 on ebay,like you I read and read the book but can't get a handle on it but show me and I get it.

woosterken