Magellan eXplorist 500 Problems

by William Brannon, LS
(upstate NY)

Regarding my Magellan eXplorist 500:

1) I experienced very poor customer support from Magellan. Like waiting and then getting disconnected. It took me three tries to get to a manager that understood what the problem was. Then the solution was to send me another `Mapsend Lakes card' - seems the original was defective?

2) I have never been able to download ASCII files. Error message comes up that unit is not recognized? Not sure if it is the driver and cannot find a driver on the CD nor online.

3) No warning that the last good XY value will merely be copied to the next waypoint if the next attempt at capture is under a canopy. Imagine reading the same XY values for points some 1000 to 2000m distant from each other.

4) Absolutely horrible user instructions.

5) The power cord can be physically connected two ways without a hint in the instructions as which way works and which does not work?

6) The unit instructions tell one to go outside to initialize the unit after connecting to computer to down load files? This is typical of other instructions provided.

I feel like I was using a beta test unit, while paying full price for a debugged product.

All in all, I would not purchase this unit nor recommend it to another.

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