My son and I have been looking for caches this summer. We have Identical Vista HCX's. Our typical experience is: enter the waypoints, get in proximity, then walk in the general direction. Aha, the feet are getting smaller (both GPS units), and smaller, finally they are single digits, and we believe we're within a few feet of GZ.
We start searching, and consulting the GPS's. Invariably, after a few minutes they do not agree - sometimes they disagree by 30 or 40 feet, and in opposite directions. His will say "36 feet ->" and mine will say "24 feet <-". I'm not exaggerating the difference. After another one or two minutes, his will say something entirely different and mine will too. And the GPS keeps changing, one minute pointing this way, the next an entirely different way.
Now, a lot of the caches we look for are in tree cover, and I would expect some variation - but 30 or 40 feet?
My son eventually usually finds the cache - he's very good at it.
My overall question is: when I got into this, my idea was to put the coordinates in and the unit takes you to within a few feet of the cache - I would define few as 15 feet or so. In reality, we seem to be dealing with accuracy of more like 30-50 feet.
Our software is up to date, and I have no reason to believe the units are malfunctioning. They generally work 'in tandem' really well until we get down to the actual finding. We are probably average in battery use and replacement - anyway it doesn't seem to be a malfunction, but rather a case of degraded performance, (or unreasonable expectations onm my part).
What is your experience? Am I expecting too much? Is the tree cover mostly to blame? (Our units brag about performance in such conditions).
In your experience how close does your GPS take you?
Thanks for responding.
