Garmin Etrex Tricks

Hi Everyone,

If your the owner of a Garmin Etrex GPS and you want to know how cold or warm it is outside, there is a little known Hidden Screen Status Page you can display, which will give you the ambient temperature together with some other information such as the voltage across the battery (provides more accurate information than the bar graph for the battery life indication).

The hidden screen is accessed by holding down the UP button and PAGE button simultaneously, and then pressing the PWR button to switch the eTrex on.

Does this work with all the Garmin Etrex models?

That does not seem to work for the Etrex Legend C

No result with the Legend.

Tried it on my ETrex Yellow and it worked! Though I'm a little confused, 1) why would the ETrex yellow have a thermometer in it when other higher end models don't appear to, and 2) why doesn't garmin make this information accessible during normal operation?

The reading is an internal device temperature for compensation, it is not outside ambient temperature.

That is correct. It is accessed through the "test" fuction of the GPS unit and can be accessed on all Garmin GPSs that I have played with.

http://www.gpsinformation.org/dale/secret.htm

No luck on the E-trex Vista HCX

It should, just did it on a E-Trex Vista Cx and Vista HCx at REI. It worked on both.

Really, I must be doing something wrong, I tried holding down the UP button and PAGE button simultaneously, and then pressing the PWR button to switch the eTrex on. But it just sits there with a black screen, the only thing different that I have from the store one is the new factory flash to fix the WAAS bug on boot up.

OK, just tried it and that is SO cool. ( now, as to why my GPS is right next to my computer at work...)

TRO

On my GpsMap 60Cx, holding down Enter while switching on works.

I tried powering up the Legend C while holding down the enter button on the front of the unit and it worked and went into diagnostic mode. 26 degrees, it indicated which works out to about 79 degrees fahrenheit.