monahmat

Ahh yes, and I forgot the one other thing to confuse matters. You have to account for whether the bearing is magnetic north or true north. It is often a difference of several degrees depending on where in the world you are located!

It means that you need to go to ground zero and then from there project a waypoint. So find ground zero and stand in the middle of it. Then you want to face 50 degrees, as if you were looking at a compass, which is pretty close to northeast, then pace off X number of feet. The cache should be where you stop, or that is at least where you should start your search. I carry a compass with me just to make things easier but many GPSr's are able to project these you as waypoints. Hope that makes things a little clearer for you.

I think the only way to do that is if your a premium member, but I could be wrong. If you pay the $3 a month you can get alerts e-mailed or texted to you of all the new caches in your area when they are published or you can run a pocket query and filter out the new caches in a program like GSAK or EasyGPS.

I agree with Vinny & Sue and feel both the picture and caption are harmless. I've been to a ski resorts before where bra's lined the tree line beneath a lift. Everyone, kids included, found it pretty amusing. I think the best case scenario for the log is everyone gets a good chuckle out of it and the worst case scenario is everyones prepared for what they might see.

I agree with you cach2find. I've found a few rundown ones that are disappointing. I seldom trade but when I do the items I carry are emergency whistles, ponchos and carabiner water bottle holders. One thing I've seen a couple of times now and thought was a good idea was paperback books, I might start doing that as well.

Is it possible that you just need to reselect your default geocache file from the preference menu? My assumption would be that a setting just got changed somewhere along the way but I assume it is possible the SD Card has started to go or is not seated tightly.

I use a Magellan Explorist 500 that I got refurbished off ebay. It provided the best deal on a color unit with sd card expandability.

One wood tick and one deer tick in the past week. I'm sealing them in scotch tape and starting a collection, we'll see where we are at come winter!

Great point that I often forget. I just started not to long ago as well and have 19 finds at the moment. All I would say is that experience is key. My first weekend out I had 2 DNF's and 3 finds. Those three finds took me forever. Then after just a dozen finds I got the idea of common hiding places and signs to look for and they are coming a lot faster now, I've even gone out and found two of my earlier DNFs. Every find your 'eye' gets a little bit better.

I have a Timberland Backpack that I love. It has holders for two Nalgene Bottles as well as a compartment for a Camel Back Reservoir. Also has a daisy chain on the on outside and two good size internal compartments. It works great but a lot of time its over kill. I'm looking for a smaller shoulder bag now just for a little swag, pda, camera and phone for the short jaunts.

When you go to the menu -> points of interest -> geocaches it takes you to a folder on your GPS unit. There should be a file there. If there isn't you need to push the thumbstick up and down until you get the option to go up a folder. You repeatedly go up a folder until you can't go up any more and get the option for either SD Card or Internal Memory. It's a little hard to describe and took myself a little bit to really figure out but after playing around with it for a bit you should be able to find it. Keep us posted.

So are you able to open the .loc files in the geocaching manager or no? I'm having trouble figuring out if the problem you are having is on the PC or on the GPSr. My original though was that you were transfering the files to the GPSr and then not finding them because they were on the memory card and you were looking at internal memory, as that seems to be a common mistake. But now I'm not so sure.

If you can let us know what software you are using we can help you a little bit more. The Magellan Geocache Manager software can handle both .loc and .gs files for you to help transfer waypoints. The geocaching manager have been provided with your GPSr. On the other hand a lot of users here use either GSAK or EasyGPS which both should be able to transfer waypoints to your unit trouble free.

My suggestion would be to get licensed copies of both cachemate and gsak. A total investment of $33 is well worth the money. You can then get pocket queries from geocaching.com and import them into gsak. Once you've done that it's very simple to export the coordinates to your GPSr and the descriptions to your PDA. I have just made the move to this system and am very pleased!

The Magellan Geocaching Manager will handle .loc files and when transferring to the GPSr does transfer them as .gs files. If your trying to move the .loc files directly onto the GPSr then that will not work, you must first open them in either Geocaching Manager, GSAK or a similar program.

I've been looking into buying one of those T720 batteries off of e-bay. What do you think of it? Are you getting comparable battery life to the original Magellan battery?

I am in agreement with chandljl. I recently got an explorist and find the geocaching manager very easy to use but it does not do a good job at filtering like gsak and fails to pull in some of the information I like.

I can't say for sure but I would definitely assume so. And boy is that expensive. I have a Explorist 500 and paid no where near that. I also think that one of the big problems with this would be map availability for the courses your playing. I think I'll research this a bit more. I am an avid golfer and had thought about something like this myself. Even if you did not have maps but just stored the center of the greens as waypoints you be able use it as a range finder without much trouble.

I was wondering if anyone had tried the generic batteries with their Magellan Explorist? I've noticed the Magellan website still has them on back order and found some fairly inexpensive ones on e-bay. Just wanted to make sure they would provide comparable battery life and not harm the unit in any way. Any feedback would be appreciated, Thanks! Generic Explorist Battery on Ebay

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Make sure you are using either PQs or the .GPX files. I'm pretty sure even with premium membership the hints will not show up in the .loc files.

I just purchased a Canon SD1000 strictly for this summers outdoor adventures, its small and lite weight like I was looking for so I could bring it along easily in my pocket. It also has some impressive image quality for a point and shoot. I would highly recommend it. I shopped around quite a bit and found http://www.dpreview.com/ to be a good resource. They have a lot of good information and allow you to compare a bunch of different cameras. Previously I had a older Kodak, DC290 to be exact, I was happy with it but just got sick of lugging it around.