Unit ready for cycling

When I first got my Garmin eTrex 30x I was super excited. I had been using a Garmin Edge 500 for a long time. Little things started to fail on it. You know, nothing to big, just portions of the screen. Given the thing has well over 5 years of use, I was very happy with how it did. But it was time for a new GPS.

A crazy buddy of mine, Johnny Hughes, talked me into doing the Colorado Trail Race. See this description to understand what that is all about. Getting a replacement GPS wasn't going to cut it for something like this. Looking around I finally landed on the eTrex 30x. I chose the 30x because it had great battery life, relatively light weight, sturdy bicycle mounting options, base maps, track following, color, not touch screen and a solid reputation.

I don't have piles of cash laying around so I use mine for training, navigation and geocaching with my 3 year old daughter Alyssa. She is a total geocache finding machine!

Anyway, I was a little frustrated with the usability of the default settings and had a hard time getting things configured in a usable way. Here are the steps and things I did to make it as "user friendly" as I could.

First, here is a link to Garmin's documentation. The single biggest miss in my opinion is that "double-clicking" the menu button will always return you to the "main" screen with all of the options.

Here is what I mean by "main" screen

This also shows the page sequence. The page sequence is the set of screens you are presented with when turning the GPS on and just hitting the back button. Here is the page sequence I have finally settled on.

The trip computer page shows speed, heart rate and moving time. These are usually the only things I care about.

The map page shows the map, speed, and trip odometer (distance of currently recorded track).

the elevation plot page shows total ascent and current elevation.

I also set the "main" screen to have the following order.

You can change the order by selecting the menu button. Doing this shows the reorder option.

Select this and set the order to the following. I sort them so frequently used items are toward the top.

If you do something different it would be great if you shared :-)