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Dear Werner,

You say:  "Could it be that Garmin is better than others in post sale customer support?"

I think this is most likely. It is a fair comment I suspect.
Garmin have always been ahead of the others in marketing for civilian use.  
You can see that as I did at the Southampton boat show only a few days ago,  
where their integrated GPS / radar/ echo sounder boat systems are superb,  
and they deserve to obtain the business as they clearly want to supply what 
is wanted by the customer. They probably have a huge share of the market 
consequently and make millions just selling for boat owners alone.

Trimble however, who in the 1980s made a lot of noise about being the market 
leaders in GPS equipment are nowhere in the civil market today as far as I 
know. They used to pride themsleves as being 'the tops' for GPS equipment in 
the 1980s when I bought my Transpak II. Even then, they were more interested 
in selling much more costly equipment to the precision surveying and 
agricultural market, and clearly neglected the mass civilian market.  Garmin 
produced a much better unit and cheaper shortly after I bought mine.  Now 
Trimble are nowhere in the civil market. (Unless they are selling units under 
another name that I do not know about). 

They were not interested in supplying new eproms for my Transpak II when I 
enquired after the change in millenium, and told me they considered the 
Transpak (Trimpak in USA) so old now as to be totally obsolete by 2000.
In fact it might be big and chunky but it still functions as it should except 
for the year and date display and is quite sufficient for my navigational 
purposes. I believe it has capability of military P(Y) code too with the 
right firmware so could in principle be much better than any non-mil 
equipment obtainable, but they cannot be bothered to supply any updated 
firmware to get the year and date right since 2000, even for the civil units 
of which there must be thousands around still giving useful service in 
position fixing.
Unusual for an American firm - they usually are very helpful. 

Douglas Denny.
Chichester. England.

===============

I wonder about the problems with "old" GPS sets some of you guys have. My
venerable  Garmin GPS12 was purchased in 1998 and it always (at least when I
check it) is in exact time compliance with the "radio time" (in my case
DCF77 - Mainflingen/Germany) . Maybe the reason is that I always updated the
firmware. The last update was provideed by Garmin as latet as in in 2003 (I
think this model was already discontinued at that point of time).
Could it be that Garmin is better than others in post sale customer support?
Before we had started our summer holidays this year to the US I bought a car
GPS - a Garmin (I admit, one additional point of consideration was the
availability of US maps).
Any thoughts or comparable/contrary experience?



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