I know we all have our favorite brand of GPS equipment just like we do our cars, tractors, etc. I have always been a Magellan man. I got my first Meridian Gold in 2004 and wore it out. When I left it on the back bumper of our field truck, I bought two Platinum Meridians & one Color Meridian off ebay. When I needed professional grade equipment to start my own surveying company after getting licensed, I went with a three receiver set of ProMark 3's for static. I upgraded two receivers to RTK last year, and I've always been pleased with the data I receive from the ProMark's and the navigation I get from my Meridians. I have the User Grid set up on all of them for TN State Plane. My son and I started Geocaching casually a couple years ago and now he's a Cub Scout. I saw the Magellan Triton 2000 on their website and decided it would be great for geocaching & hiking. It's got a camera, mp3 player, & geocache compatibility. The only thing that disappointed me was that it didn't have a user grid option. Then they released a software upgrade that made the user grid option available. The problem is that it doesn't calculate correctly. I've checked the numbers a couple dozen times. I got frustrated & decided to just keep it on Lat/Lon. Yesterday I purchased the newest base model by Magellan, the eXplorist 110. I thought maybe it would do a better job with the user grid. No such luck. In the Triton, when I set up the user grid the map displays only dashes for the y & x "-------". If I try to store a waypoint, it will give accurate N coords, but the E coords are about 4x too large. The eXplorist will display coords in User Grid, but the N is the meters equivalent & the E is again grossly wrong. I sent an email to Magellan's support people and all I got was a response asking me if I had a good satellite connection. I wanted to reply back, "You're not talking to a dummy here. I am a licensed surveyor." But I decided arrogance and rudeness wouldn't help me. After waiting a month with no more email response, I called them. Some guy in India wound up telling me that they didn't handle their user grid problems and gave me a web address for some British professor that has a website about user grids. I've got 8 Magellan GPS receivers, 6 of which calculate user grid correctly and two of which do not. I have the parameters setup the same in all of them.
Here's my questions: Do any of you other surveyors use Magellan handhelds with a user grid? Have you experienced the same problem on these newer units? Have you managed to solve it and can give me some assistance?
Thanks for your time in reading this long post.
Andrew Stokes, TNRLS
Andrew,
I was going to suggest checking your false easting, but it seems like you probably have it set correctly, based upon your post.
I have the Magellan Meridan, the green unit. It is the very basic unit, but works great for what I use it for.
I would check the website that they provided, but you may also search for a Magellan users group. There seems to be a user group for just about anything these days,and maybe someone has figured it out.
I wish I could be more help.
Jimmy
Jimmy,
That helped part of the problem. I had all the parameters set the same in all 8 units. As you pointed out, the problem would seem to be in the false easting. For some reason, the Triton & eXplorist needed the false easting in meters instead of feet. In the Meridian's & ProMark's I have the false easting as 01968500.0 In the Triton & eXplorist I had to enter it as 599 998.8 Now I'm getting the appropriate coords from both, but the Triton still displays dashes & the eXplorist is displaying the coords in meters even with the unit to meters conversion entered in. I'm starting to think that the problem comes from the fact that Magellan has become an international company and the rest of the world runs on a metric system. I still wish I could figure out how to get the Triton to display the coords & get the eXplorist to convert from metric to feet. Maybe somebody on this forum has fixed the problem themselves. Thanks for the help, Jimmy.
Andrew,
It has to be something n the units to meters conversion. I could be wrong though. It happens on occasion:-)
Jimmy
Andrew,
I had similar experience with the Meridians and had to figure out how to enter the values by trial and error. I am sure you know this be the units to meters conversion must be entered as the inverse of 39.37/12 and it needs to be carried out to as many decimal places as the unit will allow you to enter.
I haven't set one up in a while but in looking at the setup in a Promark3 they allow you to enter the defining constants of the zone in DD MM SS.SSSSS where as the consumer grade GPS usually is looking for decimal degree. Some of the earlier units has both a Scale Factor field and a Units to meters conversion factor to enter.
ftp://ftp.ashtech.com/Land%20Survey/ProMark%203/Application%20Notes/MM_Navigating_with_US_St_Plane.pdf
