Garmin 650 owners, Pros/Cons please
Equipment
Anyone out there have this gps?, what are your likes and dislikes? If not this model, what would you suggest?
I have rhino 655t. I have the landownership maps in it and the thing works great. This is my 3rd Garmin gps and is a great unit, especially if you have other hunting buddies in your area you want to easily track!
Oregon 600 series way better touch screen & illumination in sunlight than the 400 series.
Battery life on mine with the included rechargeable battery pack isn't too great, but I'm in the habit of only turning on GPS to check where I am or where I'm headed rather than leaving it on all the time. Seems about the same as my 400 series in that respect.
I love mine. Agree with the short battery life. Using lithium batteries gives me much more time between battery replacement
I have the garmin 600T Montana gps.. Awesome tool.. Only advice would be to get a screen protector for it. Un-protected it gets a little scuffed up..
1. Buy and download Base Camp and maps.. (Birds eye view is nice too...
Barber
It's a great gps, but I also am not satisfied with the battery life. As far as I know (I'm no techie) the only way to charge my battery is to plug it in to the charger. With my old e-trex I could at least take extra AA batteries in case I ran out of juice. With my 650 when it's out of juice it's just a paperweight in my wilderness backpack. I've seen the solar chargers, but I'm not interested in carrying one around or messing with it when I should be hunting. As it is, I use my 650 very sparingly on multi - day trips (which kind of negates the benefits of all the awesome features it has), or I carry my smaller, lighter e-trex and some extra Lithium AA's.
Oregon 600 series has a Garmin double AA battery pack that is rechargeable by plugging in the unit. But it runs just fine on Lithium AAs also.
I use the rechargeable when I'm in & out of truck frequently enough to charge & save $$ of lithiums.
If I'm bivy camping and won't be back to truck I use Lithium & take some spares, plus use the GPS sparingly.
Carl
The Montana 650 is a great unit. It'll do anything you need it to do and has a large, easily viewable screen, and with a 32G micro sd card, I can carry satellite imagery, topo and HuntingMaps all on the same chip and then select which I want to view either individually, or in tandem (overlays) with each other. The newest firmware update makes some great improvements to speed as well.
TIP: To greatly extend battery life, find the powersave feature in the sub menus and enable it (don't remember exactly where, but a little digging will find it) and you'll extend your battery life by at least 3x. Once I made that change, I went from roughly 14-16 hours of use on a battery charge/replacement to over 3 days of use between battery changes.
