SPC in a Garmin 78s

I bought a Garmin 78s, hoping that it was a new and improved version of the 76s I have been using for a long time. It has the same buttons on it, which are different from other model lines, so I hoped the software was similar. Well, the receiver sensitivity is much improved, it updates the map faster, the memory is larger, and some other things are improved.

There are a lot of user-inconvenience things I'm NOT happy about, mostly having to do with data entry and maneuvering between screens, and all of the distance and time data you used to be able to get about routes has been dropped so the route page displays nothing but waypoint names.

To the main point of this post: It added Lambert 2-Parallel projection to the choices for User Grid. Our SPC is Lambert 2-Parallel, so I was happy about that until I found that the scale factor it lets you enter is not applied and you are stuck in meters.

I put Iowa North SPC parameters into the Lambert2 User Grid, with a scale factor of 1.0, and get correct display in meters as compared to CorpsCon6. So far, so good.

Then I changed the scale factor to 3.28083333 expecting to see the waypoints displayed in feet. It didn't change the numbers - still in meters. That's a bug that I'm trying to explain to their tech support.

I tried the Lambert 1-Parallel grid, and find that the scale factor IS applied there. But it is applied before the false northing and easting numbers are added, which causes two minor problems. 1) It will further mess up people who bastardize their SPC by scaling coordinates (rather than distances) from grid to ground. 2) The SPC is defined with falsing in round number meters, and it would be more convenient if those could be entered instead of needing to enter them in feet. Considering that so far tech support hasn't understood my complaint about the scale factor not being applied, I don't think I'll get into the subtleties of the order of operations.