I have had an astro 220 for a couple years, and now I have a 320 for about a week (so limited testing so far).
In my experience with the 220, the dog compass will not reliably point to the collars if they are within a 30-50 ft., I assume this is because if the hand held unit margin of error is 15-20 ft. when locked onto satellites, and if the collar has the same level of accuracy, the compass pointer can be off by the combined error and point in the wrong direction when the dogs are close. I never had this problem when the dogs are 50yards or more away from me. You will not be able to close pinpoint a collar within the margin (or circle) of error. Both GPS units would have to give less than 1 ft. margin of error to do this.
I will soon be testing both my 220 and 320 side by side, using both DC30 and DC40 collars. I will post what I find in a few weeks.
My hunting partner was having problems with his DC40 collar about 6 months ago, and Garmin had an unspoken recall of many of them to fix an internal problem. He just got his fixed DC40 back, so while he has not had any problems with it, we also have not put it through extensive testing yet. We shall see what turns up.
If you do decide to go with an Astro 220 unit, you can purchase longer antennas specifically tuned for this unit from a couple different hunting dog supply sites.
Regards,
Walker
In my experience with the 220, the dog compass will not reliably point to the collars if they are within a 30-50 ft., I assume this is because if the hand held unit margin of error is 15-20 ft. when locked onto satellites, and if the collar has the same level of accuracy, the compass pointer can be off by the combined error and point in the wrong direction when the dogs are close. I never had this problem when the dogs are 50yards or more away from me. You will not be able to close pinpoint a collar within the margin (or circle) of error. Both GPS units would have to give less than 1 ft. margin of error to do this.
I will soon be testing both my 220 and 320 side by side, using both DC30 and DC40 collars. I will post what I find in a few weeks.
My hunting partner was having problems with his DC40 collar about 6 months ago, and Garmin had an unspoken recall of many of them to fix an internal problem. He just got his fixed DC40 back, so while he has not had any problems with it, we also have not put it through extensive testing yet. We shall see what turns up.
If you do decide to go with an Astro 220 unit, you can purchase longer antennas specifically tuned for this unit from a couple different hunting dog supply sites.
Regards,
Walker
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