g-o-cashers

Couple of things: If you haven't updated to the latest software, you should this ASAP. The default 2610 software (2.95 I think) is missing a lot of features. The current version is 3.90. Set your "Home" waypoint. You can then easily navigate back home by pressing "Find" twice. Check to see if the tabs are set up as transparent on the map page, if not you should because you can see a lot more of the maps. I also customized my tabs to have information I wanted vs. the defaults. You'll also want to check the version of City Navigator that came with it. If its version 5 and you just bought the unit you can get a free upgrade to v6. See www.garmin.com/unlock for details. If you have any specific questions let me know. GO$Rs

I upgraded my 60cs to v3.5 (from v3.43) before a big day of caching this weekend (never smart) and encountered a problem I've never have seen before. I was using the geocaching mode to get from one cache to the next so my caching went something like this: I would find a cache, mark it as found, the unit suggests the next cache, I say goto, the unit prompts me for on/off road, I select off road. Then I would drive to the next cache get out of the car and start walking to the cache. If I watched the "distance to destination" counter it was working because I could see it counting down but the location cursor on the map was "stuck" on the road. I tried canceling navigation and doing another off road goto but that would not fix it. Only a power on power off seemed to bring it out of that state. This happened at least 6-7 times. It may be just coincidental that it happened after the upgrade, maybe I just never noticed it because I don't use the geocaching mode much. I have CityNav 5 maps loaded on the unit. Anyone else seen anything similar? GO$Rs

One suggestion. Check your icons to see how they look in night mode. If your icon is primarily black or some other dark color you won't be able to see it if you use the night mode of the 60cs. If found this out the hard way doing some night caches the other night. GO$Rs

Sweet, now if they would just let you define a custom cursor.

For those of you using City Navigator on your 2610/2650 or StreetPilot III there is a new CityNav v6 that was released on 7/1. The CD can be ordered and will be available on 8/1 -- go here. It'll be interesting to see how Garmin handles the upgrades of the 2620 which runs the same software but is preloaded onto its internal hard drive. BTW, I have to put in a plug for Garmin's customer support. I activated my unit on 6/20, 10 days before the 7/1 release date which meant I would be facing a $150 upgrade. I called and they gave it to me for free. GO$Rs

I just got four PQ's around 2:00pm EST and all of them which are nearly 500 waypoints each were around 70-80 waypoints.

Maeglin, I'm curious about one thing in the design of Cachemate. Why did you decide to designate "Found", "Not Found" and "Owned" as categories in your application? To me this feels unnatural and this is where I have run into some confusion. It seems like these things should be properties of a cache rather than a categorization, similar to cache type or container type. A much simpler model would have been to assume "Geocaches" was a category and then provide a general purpose filter capability on properties of a cache (type, container, found/not found, etc). Then I could just import and manage one geocache database in Cachemate for the caches I care about and not have to worry about managing multiple geocache .pdb files and their relationships to categories. The distinction of Geocaches vs. Benchmarks does make sense to me as a category, they are different objects, not merely the same type of thing with different attributes. So I was thinking about doing just this (i.e. managing a single geocache pdb with all found/not found caches I care about and creating a Geocache category) but many parts of the application (primarily filtering) rely on the fact that the found/not found are kept as separate categories. There isn't any other way to filter other than category. BTW, Cachemate is a very useful program, I use it daily. I'm just trying to understand why you designed it the way you did. Thanks! GO$Rs

I'm using CacheMate 3.5.1 on a Palm Tungsten T. I store all of my data on the SD card. About two weeks ago I started fresh. I cleaned all of the .pdb files off my SD card and deleted all of the caches in CacheMate. I then ran GSAK over my latest PQ's and created two .pdb files, a "found" and a "not found" database. I imported them into CacheMate into the Found and Not Found categories respectively and everything looked fine. The number of caches reported when importing was the same as the record count for the Found and Not Found categories that I imported into. So a week or two has gone by and I reran the process generating the Found and Not Found pdb files again. Since then I've found a few new caches most of which were on my not found list. If I look at the .gpx files generated by GSAK my "found" gpx includes the new files I found. However, when I import the found database into CacheMate it doesn't seem to move the newly found caches to the Found category. The count reported during the import seems to match GSAKs record count but the count of the records in each category looks like the old value (plus or minus a couple caches, isn't not exactly the old count). Under Preferences I don't have "Preserve old item category" checked. I do have "Merge import file records" checked. I don't modify any records on the Palm side, I use it purely as a read-only database. Is this normal behavior, is there something I might not have configured properly? GO$R

I see the update to CS, but couldn't find out anything about the CN upgrade to v.6. Can anyone post a pointer to CN North America v.6 upgrades, announcements, etc.

Link for 76CS Link for 60CS Changes made from version 3.30 to 3.40: Corrected problem with Sight N’ Go not projecting correctly. Corrected problem that could occur during compass calibration that could cause incorrect compass readings.

I would highly recommend these guys. I purchased a AA charger and a bunch of PowerEX 2000mAH batteries a year ago. I wouldn't go out and buy the 2300mAH batteries because you always will pay a premium for the high end battery. I don't worry about my GPS and batteries any longer. I turn it on and let run on the way to the cache and I leave it on all the time -- which above almost anything else will give you better GPSr performance. Once the batteries show any sign of running down I just swap them -- there's always a fresh set or two in my backpack. GO$Rs

I'm surprised at how few Garmin GPS12's there are. Garmin has claimed that it was the most popular GPS ever made & they still sell it. That's what I'm using. You can't beat it for a no nonsense durable GPS that seems to have great signal lock relative to other GPS's that I've cached along side. It is very big compared to the new models.

GSAK wins hands down over EasyGPS in terms of waypoint management and export capability. The interface to GSAK could use a little work in my opinion but in terms of capability there isn't much out there that can compete unless you are willing to use gpsbabel which has only a command line interface. On the other hand ExpertGPS blows away GSAK in terms of its ability to work with orthos, topos, and scanned maps. To do the equivalent with GSAK you would need to use OziExplorer. The integration is kind of clunky from my experience. Ozi doesn't have the direct integration with the Terraserver so maps have to be downloaded manually -- a real pain. My solution, I use both. I use GSAK to manage a large offline cache database on my laptop which I update with pocket queries once a week. I use it to generate .gpx files to load into and view in ExpertGPS and .pdb files to put on my Palm to use in the field. GO$Rs

wherearewe, I posted a similar question to one of the usenet GPS newsgroups last week because I'm in the process of buying a 2610 and a 60cs. I wanted to know if City Nav which comes with the 2610 works with the 60cs before I went out and spent another $130 on City Select. I received several positive responces from people indicating that they were able to use City Nav on the 60cs without any loss of functionality (specifically autorouting does work). I should have both units in a month or so -- I'll post here once I find out if it really works. I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences (or anyone else's for that matter). GO$Rs

http://www.geocaching.com/my/logs.aspx?s=1&lt=3 is about the best you can do. GO$Rs

It seems like I've seen this posted before but I couldn't seem to find it -- please redirect me if you know of a previous post. I'm caching in a group of people who have quite a large number of finds. One of the biggest challenges when organizing a trip is to find a place where we can all make at least a few new finds. There must be a piece of software out there that can take multiple .gpx "found lists" (one from each cacher), compare that to a .gpx of potential caches and generate a .gpx file of caches that no one has found (or at least identify how many in the group have found it). If you now of such software or how to use an already existing tool to do this I'd love to know. BTW, doing a search for "caches found by username" and noting which one's I've found isn't a solution. It takes too long when there are hundreds of finds involved and more than yourself and one other person. GO$Rs

I've been using GSAK and Cachemate for the last week or two and although I really like the combination I'm having a problem that I need help with. Using .gpx based pocket queries I receive all of the caches in NE once a week. I load these into GSAK. Using a series of filters (owned, found, not found) I export .pdb files for my Tungsten T. These are fairly large files ~1MB so I put them on the external card. Once I synch them to the Palm, Cachemate detects them and I import them into the appropriate category. Everything works fine except it looks like Cachemate is having some problems supporting multiple databases on the external card. Only the caches from last database which I imported look correct. Cache entries in all other databases seemed to have "lost" their descriptions and logs (I'm guessing that this is the info kept on the external card vs. the in memory database). Any one else seeing this issue? -GO$Rs

FWIW, I sent an email to Garmin asking them whether 2610 or 2620 software was compatible with the 60cs -- they claimed that neither software is and that I would need to buy separate software for my 60cs. GO$Rs

If I bought a Garmin 60cs and a 2620 (with the preloaded maps) would I still end up having to buy the map software for my 60cs? Sort of two questions -- does the 2620 come with CD's or is the data transferable off the unit and, if so, is that map data compatible with the 60cs. GO$Rs

I noticed this morning that this bug is no longer valid and doesn't count as a bug "find" any longer. Bummer, I thought it was an interesting idea! GO$Rs

It was started here in Massachusetts by a long time cacher dhjennings. The geocaching.com page for this bug is here. The owner's page for it is here. You shouldn't remove the copy of it you found from the cache where you found it. Once you've seen a copy, note the bug number, go online, print out the bug page and drop a copy into another cache(s). You can then grab the bug online and drop it into the cache where you placed it. Take a look at the map for the bug -- its reaction is picking up steam. GO$Rs

There is something strange with bug notes here (or I'm just being thick). This is how it seems to work now. I can note a bug without the tag ID. This bug is "claimed" for me in my bug total stats and in my "Travel Bugs Found list". If I remove the note from the bug my stats get cleaned up but the bug still shows up in my "Found List". I guess the way I would expect this to work is that if I make a note on the bug that it is not claimed in any way by me (since it doesn't require the ID any longer) -- either in my stats or in my found list. This is the bug I used to test (a bug I previously did not find). Can someone remove it from my "Bugs found list"?!?! GO$Rs

Does that mean that putting a note on a bug no longer gives you the ability to claim the bug as found? Seems there is a need for two types of notes: 1) A note where you can enter the tag ID and claim the bug as found. 2) A note on the bug were you don't enter the tag ID but you don't claim the bug as found. GO$Rs

Feature request: Is there any way to add the ability to sort the results of a bug search by "Location". It would be helpful when doing a "Found By" search so you can see how many and which bugs a person is currently holding onto. GO$Rs

Another nit in addition to the one I posted above: Go to the advanced search page and search for bugs seen in a cache which has never had any bugs. You'll see the "No results were found for your search." string at the top of this page. Now search in another cache which has had bugs. The results page with all the bugs will have the "No results were found for your search." string across the top. I was using the search by waypoint ID if that matters. GO$Rs