I used my new Garmin C340 for the third time this past weekend. The two prior times it was flawless but this weekend it was a mess. We were in the "cereal" city of Battle Creek to attend a grandson's hockey game. The number of occasions it gave me bad information was very disturbing, so bad it became laughable. It never did give me proper directions to the rink (which we had never been to before). He was in a tournament so we left and came back and each and every time it gave me bad directions. We asked for a shopping mall, knowing there was a huge one about one mile away and it listed malls 20 and 30 miles away. I asked it for directions back home (preprogramed location) and it gave me bad directions. I was sitting one block away from the main expressway route out of town and it was directing me in the opposite way. If we heard it say "recalculating" once, we heard it dozens and dozens of times all weekend. To say it was frustrating is an understatement. I asked it for an American restaurant and it sent all over the place, when their was a very good one only two blocks away. What's with all this???? Anyone else run into this? Is it because the city's database is not up-to-date or what? Any ideas?

 

Sorry about that Dave. My son tells me that sometimes the cache loads up in the Garmin units and you simply have to unplug the thing from its power supply and allow it to reset itself after a few minutes. I found that out quite by accident because I ripped it off my windshield and in the process unplugged the battery once when it sent me into what apparently was a murder scene in Harrisburg PA. (The CSI crime semi-truck and 100 police units were all around me). When I was finally able to find a decent place to stop the car, I plugged it back in and it took me to the hotel which was about 15 minutes away. I suspect your unit just overloaded and it gets kind of freaky when that happens. Other than that one incident I've never had any problems with mine. I did telephone Garmin about it and they seemed quite surprised -- go figure. I still love it despite the incident and normally have no problems. I've been lost in worse places and since I have the unit I seldom get lost anymore. Its still one of my favorite things.

 

I used to have similar problems in major metropolitan areas like New York City and Philadelphia. Since I bought an auxillary antenna I haven't had any problems with it.

Did you try rebooting it (turning it off and on again). That would sometimes clear my unit up.

 

Additionally, there is a reset button under the front nacelle that has the word Garmin on it. If you look closely, there is an indentation that allow you to remove the nacelle (frame) around the display screen. On the right side there is a small reset button that can be pushed in using the head of a ball point pen for example or perhaps the end of an paper clip that has been bent.

Shortly after we got ours (C-330) it totally locked up and even the power button would not re-boot it.

 

We haven't had any problem with ours yet, but haven't been into really congested areas either. They aren't perfect though. It can't get us out of our neighborhood or into it either.

To enter our neighborhood, it directs us to turn up a street from which we can't access our home, to leave, it does the same, then after we make one turn, "re-calculates" and instructs us to a street that has been blocked off for years.

Good to know that a "re-boot" may help if the instructions seem really odd.

Dave, I see you've used it before without problem. Not to imply you're not using it properly, but is there any chance you were making the turns prematurely?

This happened to us last night. We had a turn ahead. I didn't think it was time to turn, but Rick said turn. I turned. Then we heard "re-calculating". Turns out (pun intended) I needed to cross another intersection before turning.

 

I unplugged the power supply and put the unit into storage each time we stopped at any location (rink, mall, restaurant, etc.). Additionally I turned it off and on half a dozen times as well during the course of events. So neither of those possible fixes changed anything.

Lainey, that was the kind of thing I experienced over and over. It would direct me to take a turn where there was no street, or it would tell me to go down a one-way going the wrong way, or it directed me into a sub that went in circles and never did meet up with the road it was showing me I should be on.

Matt, if worse comes to worse I'll try that next time. I kept getting the feeling it wasn't so much the unit as it was the city itself that caused the problem.

 

And yes, I did make a couple premature turns but then I wised up and watched the distance reading if the streets were very close together and congested.

But at least it didn't send me to any murder scenes! That's when you know that technology is trying to take over........

 

And it's not necessarily the GPS's fault, either. Maybe the mapping data for that region has not been updated in a while (there really are only two companies in the world that supply their data to all GPS manufacturers) -- that's a problem that I come across in Houston given all the road construction around I-10; even though they;ve been at it for the last three years or so, the data just has not caught up with the new routes.

 

we recently had a similar problem with ours on a trip to Texas.

She was "recalculating" so much I thought she was stuttering...

I unplugged it for a few minutes then started it up again and it worked ok.

Willinathen

 

Lesson learned. GPS worked so good on my first two trips out of town I thought I could toss out the paper maps. Better not. The funny part of the weekend was how easy it was to get to the ice arena today when we returned. Even though I had been there two or three times the day before I wondered how easy it would be to find my old way. I looked it up on the Internet, printed out a quick print of the downtown section and easily drove to it in just two turns.

Ulrich, I kept wondering as it had me driving in circles the day before where these system collect the information from. My wife and I were shaking our heads the day before when we are looking out the car window at Kohl's store a half a block away and the system is telling us the closest one is 23.4 miles away. Hummm..