Customizing Your GPS - Part 2

 Dan continues with the steps to properly set up a GPS receiver (eTrex30).  Everyone in your hiking and hunting group should consider what Dan has to say. 

Is your GPS set up correctly?

First Steps

Garmin refers to the square tiles such as Map, Compass, Calendar, etc. as Pages and the default setting is to show all available pages. This makes the display unnecessarily crowded and frankly, you will most likely never use at least 50% of the pages. So let’s clean up our display by hiding a lot of the superfluous pages. Ultimately it’s up to you as to which pages to show/hide and remember, you can always add pages back in if you miss them later on.

To remove a page, select any page and click the Menu button. This will display a popup that says, “Change Item Order”. Press the Thumb Stick to select this option and you’ll see a list of all the pages. Navigate to one that you don’t want (say, Photo Viewer) and press the Thumb Stick again. You’ll see two options: Move and Remove.

Choose Remove, press the Thumb Stick to select this option and then it will return you to the list of pages. Navigate to another one you want to remove and repeat this process. The pages in the list will depend on your device, however, at a minimum you should KEEP the following pages:

1.       Map

2.       Mark Waypoint

3.       Where To?

4.       Compass

5.       Trip Computer

6.       Setup

7.       Waypoint Manager

8.       Track Manager

9.       Profile Change

The pages don’t have to be in that order (if you want, you can reorder them by using the Move option as shown above and then using the Thumb Stick to move the page up or down in the list of pages). Those nine pages should allow you to accomplish 99% of your navigation activities and will greatly simplify the display of information. Later on we’ll talk about some tricks that will allow you to see information from some of the pages you removed without actually having to go to that page.

One last thing about pages before moving on: The list of pages that you see is actually also a page (no matter which/how many pages you’ve chosen to display, it is referred to as Main Menu). This can get a bit confusing, so let’s talk about how this works. The idea here is that you have your Main Menu of frequently-accessed pages, but you can also quickly cycle through specific pages just by pressing the Back button. You configure this in Setup > Page Sequence > Add Page.

So let’s say that you want quick access to the Compass and the Map pages. Using the Add Page option, you can add both of those to the list of pages.

Once you’ve done that, navigate back to the Main Menu. Everything looks like it did before, right? Now click the Back button once. What happened? Click it again. What do you see now? The first click of the Back button should’ve taken you to the Compass page, and when you clicked it again, the Map page should’ve been displayed. To return to the Main Menu, click the Back button a third time.

Basically, the concept here is that you can create a list of “Favorites” and then simply change between them by clicking the Back button. Personally, I’m more a fan of navigating to pages via the Main Menu, but if you like this method, feel free to add as many pages as you want. In fact, you can almost entirely do away with the Main Menu page itself by adding all the pages above as separate pages and then removing the Main Menu (you’ll see this option in Setup > Page Sequence > Main Menu.

The catch here is that there is no separate page for Mark Waypoint. This is a very important feature for most GPS users, so if you want to see it, you would need to add the other eight as separate pages and retain the Main Menu. Then, when cycling through the pages using the Back button, you’ll see the Main Menu page in the sequence with only one tile on it—Mark Waypoint.

Before moving on, if you’re lost in the myriad of pages on your device, keep pressing the Back button until you get to the Setup page. Then follow the steps above to reset your settings and after that, re-do your list of pages so that it looks like the list above. Since the GPS can only display icons for 6 pages, two screen captures are shown below:

(In case you haven’t already discovered this, you don’t always have to scroll down through options; you can also scroll up—simply press up on the Thumb Stick when you’re at the top-most visible option on a screen and then it will take you directly to the bottom-most option.)