Aye-Ch

You need to press the Menu button to change this: Go to the Main Menu Select Find Select Geocache (or Waypoints) When you are looking at the list, press the Menu button Select Find by Name Thanks, now its showing me all the caches listed in alphabetical order, which is what I was looking for!

Ok, its showing me the 50 closest to my home location. Now I need to figure out how to change my setting to "find by name"...I'll work on figuring this out while watching to see if anyone has a quick answer here.

I've loaded 145 waypoints onto GSAK, but when I do a transfer of all those waypoints onto my 60SCX, only 50 seem to be on the gps. I don't think I have a filter set (but this is my first try using GSAK), therefore I should get them all. My unit accepts up to 50 routes, so I thought maybe I was somehow transferring them as routes, but I don't think that the problem. Anyone able to help? Its a beautiful day here and I'd love to get this fixed and go caching!

I went caching in the rain this past weekend. Put the nuvi350 in a freezer ziplock and off I went with no troubles! True, I have avoided the few caches in my area that require stream crossing, but yesterday I took it out on the boat and stopped to find caches on islands. As for the navigation screen, from what I can tell the nuvi isn't much different from the 200-and-some-dollar handheld that I just got and can't quite figure out how to use efficiently. With the nuvi, I key in the coords, hit go to and the purple hightlighted arrow points to the cache while the distance yet to be covered to reach the cache counts down from miles, to tenths of miles, to feet. Generally the navigation screen gets me to the cache, but if it doesn't then I use the realtime coordinates which once I got the hang of it is pretty efficient. My fully charged battery lasts for four full hours of bright screen navigation which has been enough to cover an entire park full of caches. Sure I plug it in to the cig lighter when driving from park to park, but I'll do the same thing with my handheld if I can ever figure out how to use it as well as the nuvi. I have much respect for the experienced cachers out there. Most of them speak highly of handhelds, so I'm assuming that once I get the eTrex Summit up and going I'll understand the hype over handhelds. Until then, I'm having a hard time convincing myself to take the time to learn it when I have so much fun with the nuvi (good lord I sound like a commericial!) The nuvi is intuitive, the Summit is not (for me)...

I've been using my nuvi 350 to find 330 caches so far - not many in the long term, but plenty enough for my first 3 months of caching! I recently received a hand held, but I honestly haven't been all that motivated to figure out how to use it, as I am quite happy with the nuvi. I take extra precautions for protecting it in the rain (just put it in a ziplock, doesn't affect accuracy or useability as it has a touch screen) and I am careful not to drop it (alhtough I have dropped it twice and each time it bounced off the concrete, scared the bejeezus out of me but still works fine!), and getting at least three hours of battery life per charge has been sufficient for me so far - although this is a bit of a concern as I don't want it to die while I'm out bushwacking. Feel free to email me if you need any help, I'd be happy to do what I can. There are different settings for street navigation and for caching.

Thank you everyone for your comments. This is such a helpful community!

Yippee! For my birthday I received a eTrex Summit HC with Topo Maps. I've done a bit of reading the the forums, and I rarely see this model motioned. Does anyone have experience with it? I had been using a Garmin nuvi 350 for my first 300 finds and it served me fine (LOVE the street navigation), but I'm looking for something that is more reliable under tree cover (and any handheld will have better battery life, be sturdier than the nuvi). Also the Summit has an electronic compass - does anyone actually use this? I can exchange the Summit for something else if this model isn't a good choice, and I don't have to stay in the Summit price range. Any suggestions?

Oh, and there's also the question of durability. I assume the nuvi is not waterproof, so if I am afraid it will get wet I just put it in a freezer bag for protection. This works well as it has a touch screen and the reception is not effected by being in a bag. Also, I just dropped my nuvi on a concrete floor this past weekend (surely you heard my very loud explitive, even all the way to where you live!), and it still works fine. I don't plan on making a habit of dropping it though!

I use a Garmin Nuvi 350 that I got for Christmas, which I planned on using exclusively for street navigation until I discovered geocaching. I have no experience with typical GCing handhelds, and therefore don't know what I'm missing. It would seem from reading past logs (both on this thread and on others) that I am missing out on something, I just don't know what. I would agree with others that the battery life is limited, I generally can do 3-4 hours of steady caching without a new charge, and I like to have my screen brightness quite high. However, my battery is brand new, so I expect that battery life will decrease with age. My understanding so far is that the only drawback to using a car GPS rather than a handheld is battery life. I would love to hear some feedback on this! With the nuvi 350, I can input coordinates (manually or download), save them, name them, assign location type (POI, favorites, etc), and get turn by turn directions for nearest parking. I can choose from options of off-road, shorter or faster distance, pedestrian, car, bike, etc mode, and then when I am close the the cache I switch to pedestrian and off-road option, and then I follow the purple highlited line to the cach location (often this is quite close for listed coordinates!) Following the purple line is not always accurate enough, so I also switch to "My Current Location" and watch the lat/long change as I walk, making for an even more accurate location. You will definately need to switch the nuvi to WAAS navigation (mine came with various options). As long as I continue to do caching alone, I do not yet know what the benefits of a handheld are (although again, I would love to know if there's something other than battery life!). I would like to attend some events this summer, but I am a little concerned that there might be an attitude of "she only uses a nuvi". Seems like most people say not to use car navigators, but for the type of caching I've done so far its worked great for my not-experienced, newbie self! At an event I would likely run into problems of not having an opportunity to recharge the nuvi as often as needed.

I received a Garmin Nuvi 350 for Christmas, and although I had vaguely heard of geocaching I had no intention of using it for the activity. After caching for 1 1/2 months, I can say that I am quite happy with my Garmin. I can use it to give me street by street directions to the coordinates that I want to go to, and then I switch it to "off road" and "pedestrian" modes, and off I go. I can follow the purple highlighted line to ground zero, or if I need extra help then I put it on "my location" where I can watch my current coordinates change as I walk, which gives me my exact location. Granted, I don't know what using a typical geocaching GPS is like, from the one person I've talked to, it doesn't give them street directions to the coordinates, which is a must for me. I've been told I can download cache coordinates to the Garmin, and no hand-entering is necessary. The only reason I haven't done that is that I don't want to spend the time learning how to do it (lazy when it comes to that kind of thing, same reason why I haven't gone paperless). As for the battery, I keep it plugged in when in the car, but I'm pretty sure that if I tried going all day without a recharge it would be dead. I'd like to go to an event cache this summer, but I'm kind of afraid that my non-traditional GPS will leave me in the dust compared to others. But for my purposes right now the Nuvi 350 works great. Also, I don't believe that the Nuvi series is very water resistant, so I always carry a couple small freezer bags to put the Nuvi in. It has a touch screen so the bags don't interfere with operation.

In Wisconsin mamma cat has placed the Eagles and Islands series, all accessed by a boat of some kind. Not having a boat I haven't been to any of these, but maybe you want to look at them.

Permethrin (sp?) is my new best friend. For $8 - $10 you get a bottle of permethrin that you spray on your clothing (NOT on skin), let it dry for at least a couple hours, and voila - no more ticks! I have a moderately severe insect phobia (ticks particularly), which would have prevented me from continuing to GC during any time of the year other than the dead of winter. I did a search of previous tick prevention strategies and found permethrin. The directions for the bottle said to use 1/2 of the bottle for a shirt, pants and socks, but being that my clothes are bigger than the average person's, and I wanted to be absolutely sure to not have any ticks on me, I used the entire bottle. I have not yet had any adverse reactions, and even if using this chemical has future health repercussions I figure that the quality of tick-free life is infinitely more important than my length of life (I seriously cannot handle ticks, but don't want to spend oll of spring, summer and fall indoors)The permethrin lasts for about 6 washings, and I use it only on dedicated caching clothing so that I'm 1) Not spending a fortune on coating all of my clothes with permethrin, 2) limiting my exposure to the chemical by not having it on me when I'm not in the woods and have little chance of tick exposure, and 3) not getting the chemical on others that may touch me (I work with kids). I have only seen one tick on me (while I was sitting on a log - remember the earlier post?) while using permethrin, and that tick was half dead, couldn't walk, and fell off on its own while I was signing a cache log.