On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 11:28:07AM -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:

Thanks for posting your resolution. If I follow correctly, it sounds like once you normalize the waypoint files, then your only real complaint about 4.30 is startup slowness. It sounds like you can display mkgmap-generated files and route with them.

So far as I have tested, yes. I had other problems with the loss of tracks, but that looks as if I had forgotten to "umount" the Garmin volume on at least one occasion and had a corrupt vfat file system. fsck fixed that, and I have had no further problems. It would be nice if the etrek firmware did its own checks on its fat32 filesystem now and again, but it seems to be down to the (informed) user. I have had some problems with address lookup which sometimes seems to fail in circumstances where previous firmware versions worked. But I don't use that often, and haven't really explored that properly, so I could be wrong. There have always been some address failures with mgmap- generated maps in my previous experience, but it seemed to depend on how one navigated through the menus. I didn't get around to any objective analysis. As for the slow startup, I should mention that I have a 32GB sdhc card installed, and keep a large number of georeferenced photographs there, among other things. The firmware searches and locates these photographs (I don't know how to turn that off), and it seems to do that at start up. I have been steadily increasing the number of these photographs, so part of the slow down may be because of this startup search takes longer to plough through everything. Currently I have around 7GB of these pictures, so even just looking at the exif tags takes some time. If I was designing the firmware, I would do the search after the initial boot. Another plausible reason for the slower start up is that the firmware was trying and failing to parse the "old" Waypoint files. Since I have converted them with gpsbabel and cleaned out the old crud, my subjective impression is that the start up is a little less slow.

I have much older firmware on my Etrex 30, and this makes me inclined to update, since in general it seems like some bugs are likely to be fixed. But maybe I should hold off...

As I have only recently cleaned up the Waypoints, I don't yet have enough experience to give a firm answer. But I think it should be reasonably safe. Good luck! ael