Ted Lindgreen wrote:

The 196 is a great GPS, but it has two "features", that, had I
know it before, would have caused me to never have bought it.

1. Lock-to-Road.
The 196 is a combined aviation/automotive/marine GPS.
For road-usage Garmin build in a feature, "Lock-to-Road",
to coverup both map- and GPS errors. As some maps are
pretty bad, and it seems to try to "fix" pre-SA GPS errors,
this can offset your actual position by hundreds of feet.
I have observed my 196 a few times to kick into "Lock-to-Road"
mode when flying above a road. Needless to say that whatever the
instrument then tells you is complete bogus, especially the HSI
is "fun" to watch.....
You will ask: "why the heck don't you disable this??".
The problem is that the 196 automagically enables again it all
the time as side-effect of other settings. There is no way to
set it to off and keep it off (this is confirmed by Garmin).
The only work-around I found sofar is it to religiously check
and reset it every time I at startup and then not touch power,
mode, settings, etc., anymore.

I've not had my 196 for as long as you've had yours, but I've never observed
this behavior. I'll look for it, though. My observation would have been that
lock-to-road is in effect in land-mode, but not in aviation mode. I wonder
whether we have different software versions. I'm on 2.7 (from memory). I think
3.0 is available but I haven't downloaded it.

Go to http://www.garmin.com and put in "lock to road" in the search field and it
lists several software changes that have been made in that feature.


2. Dead-Reckoning.
Whenever the 196 looses the satellites (which does happen
now and then near certain airports and/or with certain radio
settings), it does not tell you. Instead, it covers up this
fact and just extrapolates whatever your course was for no
less than 30 seconds. You can set an alarm on "accuracy",
but also this alarm is delayed by 30 seconds. So, if you
loose the satellites, only after 30 seconds you find out
that the information the 196 was giving you was bogus.


I have seen this behavior. My old Garmin 90 worked the same way. It's not a
problem for me.

Remove "SHIRT" to reply directly.