Garmin 276Cx

sgr143

sgr143

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My boat came with a Garmin 276C, which sits above the chart table. Fine as far as it goes - but it keeps on thinking it's either 1998 or 2000, and the charts can't be updated. Essentially I use it for just Lat and Long, and plot onto paper charts. OK, so nobody's moved the IoW since 2000, as far as I know; but it be nice to have more up-to-date information; and also an navigation instrument up in the cockpit now that I'm beginning to take off the trainer wheels and think about venturing further afield than the Solent.

Osprey is tiller-steered, so no binnacle to mount anything fancy on. Don't need anything that does AIS, radar, fish-finding... or Netflix... - just usable electronic charts that I will probably eventually extend to driving the ST1000 tiller autopilot, and maybe connect to the ST50 wind instrument (when I get it working properly! ...another story...). To guard against theft, I'd need to dismount it from the cockpit between trips.

I'm looking at the Garmin 276Cx; but dithering a bit because, while it's not expensive as marine chartplotters/GPS go, it's still quite a bit of dosh by my cheapskate standards (especially when you add in the cost of the charts!). All the reviews I can find about it are either just a reprint verbatim of the manufacturer's blurb, or relate to off-road driving rather than marine use.

Anyone with any experience of using one of these out there?

thanks, Steve
 
As far as I know, I'm the only person on here that's used one.

As a simple chartplotter it's fine. The display can be adjusted to make it easy to read in any conditions although max brightness and longest time before the screen shuts of does kill the battery pretty quickly. My problem was the 2017 chart, which had one serious omission (Portsmouth 'submarine' barrier) and some yellow buoys off Salcombe missing. They're the only ones I know of because the first was mentioned on here by Scala, and the second I looked at because they came up in a conversation on here too. I only used mine in the Solent and although it appeared to show everything, as a result of the foregoing I lost faith in that chart. The 2018 is said to have the barrier as it should, and maybe I'd have more confidence in that, but Garmin didn't offer it.

The shape is great for two handed use somewhere fairly comfortable, but the tapering ends make it feel a bit of a liability when wet and windy. In the bracket (where yours will be if connecting to other gear) it is much better. I had one bracket on each side of the boat so that I could always have it next to me and that worked pretty well. One niggle is that the power button should be more recessed because it used to turn itself on when in a bag etc.

Now we come to the software. I didn't get around to connecting it to a tillerpilot, so no idea how well that works, but given that the rest of it was developed by the walking and hiking bit of Garmin I'd wish you luck. I wanted to use it for racing and had hoped for a few bells and whistles over and above just creating a route to follow. Showing a start line would have been lovely but wasn't really expected, but there's nothing at all. The routes functions are truly terrible. Given that the manual is virtually non-existent it's up to you to drill down through every sub menu and guess what they might have named the bit that you're sure must be there somewhere. Bear in mind that the menus are subtly different depending on which display page you're on it does mean a lot of hunting, and as a tip write down where you found something possibly useful. By default any route order you enter will be completely ignored and reordered into something almost completely random. It is fixable with one major exception. You can't put a route in and get it to take you to the start of it. The hack is to create the route and activate it, put present position in, while not moving too far from it, as a waypoint, insert it into the route, deactivate that route, re-activate it and as you leave the 'present position' it will now take you to the first wpt. Heaven forbid you move too far from the 'present position' while doing the above as you get the boat ready to start a race, because it now becomes half a kilo of moveable ballast. If you configure a page with added data fields, don't bother with the 'point', 'distance to point' or 'time to point', because they don't do anything.

I realise I'm wasting yet more time on the 276cx. I really tried with it, but eight days ago took it back for a full refund, and am now going to be using an 8" Acer tablet in a bargain £11 Aquasac (on sale on their site) and Navionics. I know it's going to be hard to read and vulnerable, but £150 vs £750....

Simple rugged waterproof plotter, yes, but it's way too expensive for that. Buy a smaller one or go for a tablet.
 
Last edited:
sgr143 said:
My boat came with a Garmin 276C, which sits above the chart table. Fine as far as it goes - but it keeps on thinking it's either 1998 or 2000, and the charts can't be updated. Essentially I use it for just Lat and Long, and plot onto paper charts. OK, so nobody's moved the IoW since 2000, as far as I know; but it be nice to have more up-to-date information; and also an navigation instrument up in the cockpit now that I'm beginning to take off the trainer wheels and think about venturing further afield than the Solent.

Osprey is tiller-steered, so no binnacle to mount anything fancy on. Don't need anything that does AIS, radar, fish-finding... or Netflix... - just usable electronic charts that I will probably eventually extend to driving the ST1000 tiller autopilot, and maybe connect to the ST50 wind instrument (when I get it working properly! ...another story...). To guard against theft, I'd need to dismount it from the cockpit between trips.

I'm looking at the Garmin 276Cx; but dithering a bit because, while it's not expensive as marine chartplotters/GPS go, it's still quite a bit of dosh by my cheapskate standards (especially when you add in the cost of the charts!). All the reviews I can find about it are either just a reprint verbatim of the manufacturer's blurb, or relate to off-road driving rather than marine use.

Anyone with any experience of using one of these out there?

thanks, Steve
Click to expand...

Steve,

before handing over a load of dosh, try the following, which came most helpfully from Garmin when I reported that my 276C would only default to a decade earlier- I hope it works for you too, for it certainly did for my unit

Quote>
Dear Gordon,
Thank you for contacting Garmin Europe.
The issue you are seeing is related to the internal Satellite memory being full, to clear this you will need to conduct a master reset, in order to do this please start with the unit off, and then press and hold the Quit and power buttons at the same time, you will see a prompt asking if you wish to erase all user settings, Please say yes to this and it will reset your device.
<Quote
 
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