[Question For Etrex Legend Users]

Another thing you ought to consider is that if YOUR GPSr is swinging around wildly in the 20ft circle of confusion, then the person who placed the cache and marked the waypoint probably had a similar error. Thus, the cache could be 40 feet from where your GPSr indicates. My wife and I cache together. I use the GPS. She uses the force. She finds the majority of the caches without the technology.

 

The map feature is handy for triangulating. Walk in a straight line to the cache from about 100 ft away and note the trail left on your map (be sure that tracking is turned on). Do this again from a couple of different directions. Your lines probably won't cross, but you can get an idea of where the cache is. This is really fun when you're working around the bank of a large creek and the only crossing is a mile in either direction.

[New Feature - Find Nearest To Route]

Here's a feature I'd love to have for travelling. Say I'm travelling from point A to point B and want to hit some caches along the way without straying too far from the route. Currently, I would have to select some locations on the way and find nearest to each... a lengthy process if you're travelling from, say, California to Washington. Could the search process also include a function to search for any caches a certain distance from a straight line connecting two points? (Let me rephrase that... of course is could be done! Will you???)

 

Another thing I notice is that unless I search by nearest to waypoint, a distance is not given. It would be nice to have all results display distance to a given waypoint, defaulting possibly to your home coordinates.

 

Thanks for listening!

 

UniCacher

[Worst Satellite Alignment Ever]

The nice thing about Garmin is that they constantly update their firmware. Be sure you are running the most recent version. It's a pretty simple process. Just be sure to save your waypoint/track/route data because they will be deleted with the upgrade.

 

The last upgrade for the eTrex series added (finally) a west coast WAAS satellite. I now regularly get that long-awaited 9 feet of accuracy. I even had it read 7 feet once!

 

[GPS mapmaking questions!]

I have actually used my Garmin eTrex Legend to prepare a site map for development of a 25-acre site with ease. I used a program called Expert GPS. There is a 30-day full-featured trial download. The program will overlay both track and waypoint data onto a blank map, an arial photo, a topographic map or a scanned map.

 

I would say that using waypoint data would be more accurate, as well as being more appropriate for teaching the concept of mapping.

 

I am introducing a similar concept to my students at the elementary level using GeoCaching as an intro. Let me know how your project goes.