Day Late AV8er

SporTrack Pro, purchased 3/31/03, D/C 4702. No visible signs of cracks at this time. I have used it Sea Kayaking, off/on trail hiking, GeoCaching and in car nav. Hot and cold temps.

Yes they are still the same. I have MetrGuide USA 4.02 and the latest City Navigator NA v5 and both operate the same on loading "map set" sections. They seem to be sized according to memory/data. Like a large city will have several small map sets with high data capacities, while rural ares are large with less data. Works fine for me. The City Navigator has an option to click and drag an expanding square to load a large area of map sets without clicking on each individual map set.

I have a SporTrak Pro and a similar thing happened to me also. I was going from my first cache enroute to the second (walking) when I noticed a lost position, all Sats had droped out, clear screen, eradically Sats would come and go. It was like this for hours. It was a cold day, if that had any thing to do with it???? Later that day at home it worked fine. I loaded the latest firmware (5 something) later that night and it has worked fine since then. I posted a thread about this on the 15th of Dec 03. You may want to read.

When I posted this question I had 8 posts, so I thought, what newbie question could I use to make another post to get that magical "Rights of Passage" to Geocacher status. It really does not matter to me what a newbie is called, its just another post. Or as the younger folk say "what ever". I have been visiting the forums for some time now, mostly on the GPS Units and Software forum (good stuff there) and decided that I would like to have an Avatar. Come to think of it, I have a Sea Kayak called an Perception Avatar, Gee..I had one all along. Any way, I have the Flew and this is something to do while I'm sick. I would much rather be out Geocaching. I think that I am a seasonal cacher, I like the winter for caching, no bugs and Ivy. One more post to go! Hey Look, I made it to 10 with this post......I am a GEOCACHER!

Why have Tadpole under the Avatar when the number of posts that an individual has, is in view below that? I made the newbie...ops. sorry..tadpole mistake of posting the question "Whats a Tadpole" and now I know. I gather it's just another stupid newbie question. Well, with all the posts that I now find (funny how I can find so many now) why not just delete "Tadpole" and just leave it blank untill you get the magical number 10 posts and that would eleminate one newbie..ops again...Tadpole on going post. Or, how about calling any one with more than say 100 or so posts a Bull Frog because they are just grown Tadpoles. They just sit on their Toad Stools behind their PC's and post and read, post and read. I would rather be a Tadpole swimming about looking for geocaches. Newbie

Harrald, Thanks for your prompt reply. I have been educated. "If it were not for Tadpoles the Bull Frogs would have no one to look down on"

I have read post after post till' my eyes burn for the answer to "Why is the word tadpole under my Avatar"? I can guess that it's a newbe thing....or a membership thing. I did search for the answer, because I did not want to post this simple question.....but my eyes ...my eyes!

Please correct me if I'm incorrect, but if you own a purchased version of DirectRoute, it is legal (and wise) to make a back-up copy of the CD, is it not? If so, has any one out there succesfully made a copy of this program and how? I always make back-ups especially for those products that require the CD to be inserted when the program is running. I also understand the companies side of view that they are losing profits to pirated copies, but they should offer a free back-up copy to owners. Don't you think? Maybe they do offer this and I just don't know of it.

I'm glad to see this happening, and I plan on attending. I just introduced a work associate to Geocaching and he purchased a Meridian Color. I will try to talk him into attending also. My vote is for something with "Smoky Mountains" in the name also. Hats off to The Stosh for steping forward on this endeavor.

XMIT, You might want to try a program called "SA Watch". With this program you can connect your GPS to your PC and "Watch" the accuracy/drift of your unit right on your monitor. Go to www.huntting.com/sawatch/ for more info. Its a shareware program and free download. Its a cool program.

Scott, SA Watch is a program that when your GPS is connected to your PC, you can evaluate its accurace or you might say, its position drift. Each time the GPS updates its position, which I think is once a second, it plots this on the monitor with a small dot for each update. All these plots are from an initial referance point. Let it run for 30 min. to an hour and SA Watch will give you a lot of info about your GPS. Go to www.SAWatch.com (I think) to get more info and a free share ware download. Also try www.gpsinformation.net, click on the picture on the right of the Sport Trak Pro, scroll down and you can see a fine example of the program. Now back to my freeky GPS problem. I used the Sport Track Pro some more today with the same set of batteries and it has yet to have the same problem. May be it was some transient problem never to happen again...I hope. I see that Katguy has had the same problem. Any Magellan tech reps out there reading this....can I expect this to ruin another day geocaching. I think I'll take my Garmin GPSmap 176 along as backup. "An item in possession seldom holds the same charm that it had while in pursuit"

The batteries were new and there was no rain. The temperature just did not seem to be cold enough to cause this problem, but it's my only explanation. When I arrived at my home, I connected the GPS to my PC with the "SA Watch" program running and watched it plot a very small, accurate group of reference data...... Go figure. Any way, tomorrow I'll try it again. Maybe I'll just stick it in the refridgerator for a couple of hours and see how it likes that. Ha!

I used my Sport Track Pro Geochaching today for the first time in cool weather. It worked great as usual for the first find and then about 20 min. into the next search the satelite tracking started droping out, all sats would drop out seconds later 8 or 9 would come up but accuracy was way off, elevation would go to 49,800 ft and its location would bounce all over the area. The temp. was in the low 40F to upper 30F. After I gave up and went home the unit acted OK in the house (where it was warm). All screens and other functions worked OK. Was this caused by the temperature? Any body have this problem? Whats up with this?