Magellan and why I will never buy another one

[+CAKnowles]

I have spent over 600 dollars on three units by magellan. I personnally do not recomend anyone to buy from them. To get three units that won't last over a year is unheard of from any manufacturer. not sure what I will change to but I hope Magellan reads this and sees a fall in sales of there units over the new year because of it. Maybe they will learn to take care of the customers that have bought from them. I've certainly learned an expenseive lesson from them. I wonder if anyone else feels the way I do about Magellan units?

[Keystone]

I am moving this thread from the Getting Started forum to the GPS and Technology forum.

[+Sparticus06]

Sorry to hear of your misfortunes with Magellan. I personally love mine. Never have had a problem with it. Sometimes it is more accurate than my Garmin. Only problem I see now with a Magellan is that they no longer make or support the eXplorists and the new Tritons use AA batteries only. I really liked the Li-On in my 400 eXplorist.

 

Good luck with your next GPSr

[+hogrod]

I owned 6 different Magellan units over the years, and only one of them worked flawlessly. I came to the conclusion a long time ago they have major quality control issues, that's why you do see some happy owners when most have issues.

 

I would never buy another magellan, unless it was very cheap/almost free.

[+LostMontanan]

Hey Charles, this is LostMontanan from Fort Smith, I met you last year at the Frog Bayou cache....anyway, I've had 3 Magellans, one was a 200 and two were 500, all eXplorists. Never had a problem. I decided one day to try a Garmin....I hated it and took it back. Last week I decided to try Garmin again, this time I bought the Colorado 300. So far it's pretty decent. I got ten finds today with it...see you on the trails!

[+JohnnyVegas]

I have owned several magellans over the years,

My 1st one is a Meridian gold, I still have it and it still works fine, I still use it once in a while

My second one was a Sport track map, the only problem with it was that I lost it

My third one is a Sport track color, it still works find and I still it once in a while

My fouth one was an explorist 500, it always worked fine, but it was stolen in a break in.

My fifth one is an Explorist 500LE, still working fine and it is my primary caching GPS now.

My fifth and sixth are both Triton 500s I just bought on sale last week, one in on E-bay, that other I

have not decided what to do with. Being that I will only hold 1,000 caches I may sell it also.

 

I have also owned a Garmin street pilot 320, it worked fine for driving, but it is not good for geocaching and it got stolen in the same braek in as my explorist 500. I replace it with a TomTom 123 also not good for geocaching but it is good for getting to the area of the cache, I also have every star buck west of the missippi in it.

 

I wonder what problem the OP had with his.

[+mdplayers]

Hubby and I both use explorists (his is a 500 and mine is a 210) and we have a RoadMate in the truck. We haven't used any other GSPr's so aren't able to compare. We don't have any complaints about our units or with the service at Magellan. The Roadmate locked up on us on day and we called service and they sent us a replacement unit. Simple, fast, no problem.

[+trainlove]

I've had my Magellan Meridian Gold for over 4 years. I love it. It has never had a problem that others tell me happens alot with them. It did lose WAAS as did many peoples GPSr in July 07, but I spent the last year fixing that problem. See the link in my signature below for that.

 

You must be having a really bad round of very bad luck. But yes, Maggie customer support is awful and that may contribute to your distaste witht them.

[+Rockin Roddy]

I have spent over 600 dollars on three units by magellan. I personnally do not recomend anyone to buy from them. To get three units that won't last over a year is unheard of from any manufacturer. not sure what I will change to but I hope Magellan reads this and sees a fall in sales of there units over the new year because of it. Maybe they will learn to take care of the customers that have bought from them. I've certainly learned an expenseive lesson from them. I wonder if anyone else feels the way I do about Magellan units?

 

Maybe giving us an idea of what the problem is would go a bit toward getting some help if possible. Did you leave them out in the cold (below the recommended temp)? What are the "symptoms"?

[+CAKnowles]

I will help those who wonder why I'm giving up on Magellan. The first Magellan I purchased in 2007 was a "400" it quit working 2 days after I bought it. I took it back to Wal-Mart and they gave me another one. A little over a year later this one lost brightness on the LCD screen and left me unable to even see it in dim light. So I bought a "500" about one month ago it lost all the waypoints I had entered. I sent a note to the customer service rep. and he said I must have removed the battery or let it run down in order for that to happen. I did neither. I then put them back only to have it happen again, so then I decided to put them on my SD card so it would not be able to lose the data. Guess what? It lost the data on the card. It only does this if I turn off the unit and then restart it. I can only assume that during the shutdown process something is erasing the data just before it shuts off. As long as I don't shut down the unit it will not lose my data on the internal memory or the SD card. So I will find a Garmin and see if they are more reliable.

Edited January 13, 2009 by CAKnowles

[+GeekBoy.from.Illinois]

My wife and I started geocaching and both ought eXplorist 600 units. Within a month of having mine, the map zoom out button stopped working. After calling support several times I finally got and RMA number to return it for repairs. About 4-5 weks after shipping it to them I started calling them to determine what the status of the repairs were. I got a "run around" One day I would be told the repairs were completed and the unit shipped back already, another day that it was going back out that same day. After about a week of calling support 2-3 times a day I finally got to a person claiming to be a supervisor and learned that the original support person had given me an old/duplicate RMA number. They eventually tracked down my unit and shipped a replacement for it. Several months later, my wife's eXplorist 600 developed a problem where it would no longer be recognized when connected to the computer's USB port. One again, it took several calls to get an RMA number assigned and several weeks to get a replacement GPSr shipped back to us. Our next issue was that our first replacement eXplorist had new developed a problem where the USB cable would not hold on the the back of the unit any longer. The screw had appeared to had become stripped. By this point, the 1 year warranty had expired and the tech support people practically refused to repair the unit. They wanted to charge us $200 to repair this issue. We found a work-around using one of the swivel mounts. Most recently our second eXplorist has once again stopped being recognized by the computer when connected to the USB port. On that same unit, if you try to manual mark a waypoint, or try to go to a waypoint, the GPSr will lock-up and it is completely useless to us.

 

Between the first and second failures of both of our Magellan devices, I purchased us both Garmin GPSMAP 60 series devices (with the newer Sirf Star III chipset and microSD card support). These Garmin devices are so much faster to get a satellite lock and get us to geocaches much faster than our eXplorists ever have. There are features of our eXplorists that we liked, but we find that we really like a GPSr that works reliably so we are keeping with our Garmins for now.

[+Rockin Roddy]

I will help those who wonder why I'm giving up on Magellan. The first Magellan I purchased in 2007 was a "400" it quit working 2 days after I bought it. I took it back to Wal-Mart and they gave me another one. A little over a year later this one lost brightness on the LCD screen and left me unable to even see it in dim light. So I bought a "500" about one month ago it lost all the waypoints I had entered. I sent a note to the customer service rep. and he said I must have removed the battery or let it run down in order for that to happen. I did neither. I then put them back only to have it happen again, so then I decided to put them on my SD card so it would not be able to lose the data. Guess what? It lost the data on the card. It only does this if I turn off the unit and then restart it. I can only assume that during the shutdown process something is erasing the data just before it shuts off. As long as I don't shut down the unit it will not lose my data on the internal memory or the SD card. So I will find a Garmin and see if they are more reliable.

 

Good luck!! Have you considered other units other than Garmin?? Check out DeLorme, they've also got some great units (the PN-40 is the one I own). I bought this to replace my still functioning Magellan 500LE, I wanted paperless caching and I wanted the routing!! The Maggie is still a good unit, but I can't get the software onto my new computer and I'm far past entering by hand lol