ktg1986

Hey, I'm in the Minneapolis area. I've got a Garmin etrex Vista. If your receiver is like mine, make sure WAAS is ENABLED. Takes some button pushing and clicking around to do so. I've had no trouble. Typically, within the city/built up area, I'll get around 18-25'accuracy. Likely due to buildings, trees, etc blocking the horizon. When I've had it on the dash of my car and am driving outside the Metro area (Mankato, Worthington, SW Minnesota, for example), it's gotten as good as 7'accuracy. So, it has nothing to do with being in Minneasota. It's either your receiver or the local environment preventing a perfectly clear view.

This is a little off the subject of geocaching -but maybe someone here can help. I have a Garmin etrex Vista handheld GPS that I want to take with me on trips to Istanbul, Turkey and Bombay and Calcutta, India. I want to use it to help locate points of interest within those cities. The problem is, unlike for North America and Western Europe, Garmin does not offer detailed (street-level) background map software for these cities. However, I don't really need that. I just need the coordinates of points of interest that I am looking for. But, that is proving very difficult. Mapquest, terraserver, YahooMaps, etc do not offer detailed maps of these cities. Zoom in too close and is says "data not yet available". So, I can't for example, zoom down to my hotel's intersection and then look at the LAT/LONG. I have a folded paper street map of Istanbul. There are what appear to be some LAT/LONG lines crisscrossing the map, but NONE are labeled. I have paper maps of some other world cities...same thing. Nothing on the map even hints what these lines mean or what kind of projection system the map is based on. Any suggestions on how to get the coordinates of such things as major museums, train stations, monuments, hotel location/street intersection? Is there a website which may help? If that's not possible, all I really need is a paper map with the lines labeled and I could extrapolate off of that.