Mapomatic – Applications of Mapping

Introduction.

The Garmin Oregon 300t brings touchscreen technology to the Garmin handheld outdoor GPS Range.

We’ve been lucky enough to have an Oregon 300t on loan direct from Garmin UK.

Whats in the Box.

So what do you get for your money, at the time of writing an Oregon 300t from Amazon is £250.90 Here

• Oregon 300
• Carabiner clip
• USB cable
• Owner’s manual on disk
• Quick start guide

This next-generation handheld features a rugged, touchscreen along with a built-in basemap with shaded relief, a high-sensitivity receiver, barometric altimeter, electronic compass, microSD™ card slot, picture viewer and more.

The paperless caching capabilities of the Oregon give you access to the all the details on the cache listing page, including that all important hint. Along with several of the previous logs, these often prove invaluable in giving you some guidance on those more challenging geocaches.

Like previous models in the Garmin range, getting going is a simple case of unpacking the unit, and installing 2AA batteries into the unit.

Battery installation instructions from the manual are as follows.

Design.

The design of the Oregon is more like that of a rugedised PDA or the Garmin Colorado, than the previous versions of Garmin GPS receivers.

The first obvious difference to any GPS unit we’ve looked at in the past is that apart from the power button on the side of the unit there are no external controls. The Oregon is entirely driven using the touchscreen interface.

Physically the unit, sits nicely in the palm of the hand.

In Use, lets go Caching.

Like the Garmin Colorado, the Oregon really comes into it’s own when using the unit to for Geocaching. Coupled with a premium membership of Geocaching.com, you no longer need to take a sheet of paper with cache detail along with you on your treasure hunt. It also removes that most embarrassing situation that occurs when you incorrectly input the cache co-ordinates into your GPS Unit. Well be covering how to setup your Colorado / Oregon for paperless caching in a further article to be published in the near future.

In use we found the Oregon to perform on a par with our Colorado, with the following exceptions.

We ended up having to disable the on-board compass, it was erratic when approaching the cache. Causing the pointer to swing wildly. Not what you want when your turning to find a ‘twig in a forest’.

The second area where the Oregon doesn’t perform as well is the screen, because of the touchscreen overlay, we found the unit to be readable when using the back light in low light situations, however in brighter sunlight, the screen was less readble, and in strong sunlight almost impossible to read.

The use of touchscreen technology for the User interface works well, with the ‘buttons’ designed well, with six functions being available per screen, and multiple screens navigable by left and right arrow buttons at the bottom of the screen. It’s possible to customise what buttons are shown on the ‘power up’ page.

Whilst it’s possible to do most things on the Oregon with a gloved finger, navigation around the map page becomes more problematic, dragging the map with your finger, means that you can’t see whats under your finger at the same time. In an area densely populated with caches, attempting to select the one you desire can be described as ‘hit & miss’ at best. In fact it’s not much easier if you take your gloves off and use a bare fingertip.

We found the navigation within the Cache pages of the Oregon to be not as well thought about as the Colorado range, often having to return to the main menu, to then navigate back to the compass / pointer page.

One place where the touchscreen proves to be a particular advantage is in providing a faster text entry using an on-screen keyboard.

Memory Expansion.

It’s possible to expand the memory on the Oregon, this allows the installation of additional maps, pictures, and storage of more cache information.

As shown above, expansion is by a microSD card, under the battery compartment of the unit.

One thing is clear, you certainly don’t want to be swapping the memory of the Oregon when your out in a field, microSD cards are tiny, really tiny,  they’re smaller than a mobile phone sim card, and anyone thats ever had to remove or re-insert on of those will agree it’s not the easiest task.

Screenshots.

In Conclusion.

Garmin have once again brought something inovative to the handheld GPS world, it’s not clear how well the touchscreen will stand up to the rigors of caching. The screen visabilty isn’t as clear as those models without the touchscreen, for this reason we recommend that anyone considering an Oregon take a good look at the unit’s capabilites alongside those of the Colorado range. If we had the choice again, we’d take the Colorado.