DaveA

I am not sure what problem you are having, but there are some steps you have to go through to get Easy GPS talking to your GPS. First you have to go to File > Settings > add GPS where you identify the GPS you are using and the port you use to hook the GPS up to. In many cases EasyGPS doesn't allow you to change the port or speed. This can cause problems. EasyGPS isn't updated all that often and is currently lagging way behind the times. It was last updated on April 26, 2004 and even then wasn't all that current. Once you select your unit and set the port and speed (assuming the software allows you to) you then go to GPS > Test Serial Connection to check the port. If you have a PDA that uses the serial port you might have problems as the PDA software sometimes holds onto the port even when it isn't being used which prevents any other device from using it. If you have a PDA that uses the serial port, you have to hunt around to find a way to disable it which often boils down to finding the icon in the system tray and right clicking and selecting close or shut down. If all else fails download GSAK which is far more functional than EasyGPS and see if you have better luck.

I spent some time in Saudi during my Gulf War 1 days. Some very good and very bad memories from that time. The one thing I cannot imagine is geocaching there. I remember visiting the 'highway of death' and seeing the chemical mines (that officially were not used) that the winds had unearthed. In that flat, featureless landscape not even burying a cache would conceal it very long. Kudos to those of you over there who are making the sport/hobby of geocaching happen. If only I had a GPS to record the coordinates of the tons of MREs and bottled water we buried as we dismantled one makeshift base after another those would make for some really cool hunts. I don't think the prohibition on digging to place or find caches should apply to areas like Saudi that are 100% sand that the winds constantly relandscape.

If you want precision there is no consumer grade GPSr that will give you what you want. Even the best of today's units have a 10' error rate under ideal conditions. This won't do for mapping property lines. I have no idea which vendor provides better maps for your country. I have no idea if any vendor provides maps for your country. For your purposes either unit would be identical, it would boil down to which vendor had software that would work for your country. No GPS accepts maps from 3rd parties. You can, however, download coordinates from your GPS into most any mapping package for use on your PC/laptop/PDA. The Garmins use internal memory so you are limited to that. The Magellans use SD cards so you can load whatever fits onto the size card you buy. I don't think it makes any difference for what you wish to do though.

I don't own a Garmin so I am only speaking to the color screen. I have had color and non color and for a mapping GPS I wouldn't even consider non color anymore. All screens are subject to glare from bright light and it does seem true that grayscale is easier to see than color under such conditions due to the high contrast between the light background and dark markings. However, in all other circumstances the color screen is much easier on the eyes, makes it much easier to differentiate the various map items that is is simply far preferable to non color. Nobody makes black and white or gray scale maps these days for good reason. Why would you want gray scale maps on your gps? Is it worth $90 for a color screen? In my opinion, yes, no question.

In all seriousness I wouldn't get either of those if buying today. Both are great units, don't think I am bashing either, but these days you should look for a USB interface and a color screen. Today both these features are optional, tomorow they will be standard and they are both nice to have. The real choice in terms of today's units comes down to the Magellan Explorist 500/600 and the Garmin 60C/CS. Lowrance seems to be making a comeback in the GPS market which I welcome, but I know nothing about them so I won't comment. Brian mentioned the Meridians as being larger and I agree they are larger units, but believe it or not I much prefer them to any of today's smaller units. I just got a buddy into caching and he is using my old Magellan 315 while shopping for a newer unit. He is trying to decide between the Meridian Color and the smaller units from Garmin and Magellan. To him, the Meridian size is a better fit as it is for my hands. Then again we both prefer the original xbox controller to the s controllers now standard. Forget about the electronic compass/altimeter they are cool, but useless in most cases. Nice to have but rarely if ever needed. Trying to decide between the Garmin 60 and the Explorist is hard. The lack of SD card on the Garmins is a serious drawback for many and the better user interface on the Garmins as well as use of AA batteries is a huge plus for the Garmins. Whatever you decide please spend the extra dollars to get something current versus yesterday's tech that you will want to upgrade before very long. Autorouting is also a huge plus, I wouldn't buy a unit today that couldn't do it.

Ultrathon is deet based. So, I am trying to follow this thread to see if anyone has mentioned good results with a non deet based product. I don't think I have seen anything mentioned, but might have missed/overlooked something. If somebody vouches for something I am willing to try it although I am happy with using deet products, the more deet the more effective I have found. Somebody mentioned Permethrin, but I was under the impression is was a bug killer, not a repellant, am I mistaken about that?

As an FYI, you don't have to hit goto and then enter, you can simply press goto twice. Much easier as you don't have to take your eyes off the road to do this. I agree with you about it being nice to control the timing of the reroute though. One of these days I am going to have to get a Garmin, never owned one, but the 60cs does sound like a really nice unit. Over time I have more or less gotten a feel for how the Magellan determines a route and I know at what points on my route generating a new route will have the best effect. Never having used a Garmin for auto routing it is hard for me to compare the 2 though. Still, the 60cs is a really nice looking unit. Too bad these things aren't cheaper and we could all have 6 of them ;-)

Yeah, I just became a premium member and ran into that problem myself. It isn't really a problem, it is just something that requires some understanding. If you put in a query and select Thursday for the run day and it is Thursday it may or may not run. If you want an immediate (or nearly so) result emailed to you you need to check the 'run once and delete' checkbox. Then it runs right away and once you have the file you can go back and uncheck the checkbox. Long story short is if you want to generate a PQ file on the fly you need to check that checkbox or it can take a long time or it may not run at all that day. At least that has been my experience to date. Once you have your files it is no longer an issue, just set your query up to run once a week or whatever and it will get mailed to you on that day.

not many caches hidden under a bush or in a rotted out tree there, huh?

While I can understand not enjoying a foot in dog doo, it really doesn't rank high on my list of problems in the outdoors. Most parks around here have scads of ducks and geese that poop everywhere. Some places have similar issues with pigeons. Then there is the droppings of the furry animals that haunt the woodlands and praries instead of the urban parks. So, I do understand where you are coming from, I just don't share your degree of concern. Poop is one of nature's fertilizers and disappears quickly as worms and micro critters consume it as food and bring into into the soil as food for plants and other organisms. Poop is good in other words, but I do understand your aversion to stepping in it. Thing is, you will never eliminate it as long as there are animals who don't use toilets so perhaps you will want to become more accustomed to it for your own sake. The risk of disease is quite negligible if that is of any help.

mag 315 to mag meridian color. Don't consider the Explorist line an actual upgrade from the Meridians, more of a lateral move.

what is the risk in buying them a soda?

what unit do you have?

If your intent is to just leave them 'somewhere', please wait until you find somewhere that is worth going to. There are thousands upon thousands of caches that have been placed 'somewhere', but very few placed somewhere worth going or somewhere memorable. Any areas around you that nobody but the locals knows about? Perhaps some city/county/state owned piece of land that isn't a labeled park?

do you have a direct link to the product? I was not able to find it even after searching their site for butter can.

First, find out if your unit is WAAS capable. If it isn't then you are getting about as close as you can expect to the cache before the distance to the cache is closer than the positional error of your unit which results in the jumping around. If you have WAAS on then you should be able to get closer in most cases before the jumping around begins. Around 20 ft or less most of the time with 30 ft out sometimes. When I want to get my search field narrowed down as much as possible I generally stop moving when I am within 100ft and let the unit average awhile. Averaging in this case just means to let the unit average out the positions it is calculating. Most units update once per second so if you sit still for one minute you will have 60 coordinates averaged out which usually results in a better coordinate. From here I look in the direction the gps indicates and guestimate where the spot is based upon the distance the gps indicates. Then I go in another 50 ft and repeat. If I am still being sent to the same general area then I consider the position to likely be very accurate. If I am being directed elsewhere I might try and approach from a different direction and focus on the area where the two paths cross. When I close in to begin the actual search I usually walk slowly toward the spot until such time as the position starts jumping around. At that point I turn my unit off, turn it back on and go look for the cache while the unit just sits there averaging. If I don't find the cache in a reasonable time then I go back to the unit and see what it indicates. for the direction and distance. It is very rare I have to turn the unit off and on, but it has helped at times.

This is true, but I think most adults are going to regard kid items as junk. One thing I have seen is that a person will put out a cache with just kid stuff in it. That cache is unlikely to attract adult swag. The other thing I see is a cacher go find a cache with their 6 kids. All 6 of them take something from the cache and leave a kid item in it's place. Yes, there is definitely junk/trash, but I think the sheer number of kids who get taken caching end up resulting in caches with contents only a kid would love.

Click "discuss geocaching" on geocaching.com when you are logged in there. It makes the magical switch to PM here. That did it, thanks!

OK so I got a premium membership yesterday and it took effect on the main site this morning. I don't show as a premium member here, can't see the off topic forum etc. Do I just wait longer or is there something I have to do?

You seem to be using the software incorrectly. You can have four regions of 16 megs for a total map size of 64 megs, no modifications. The map size limit is not 16 megs as you've repeated several times. From what I understand, the larger the mapsize you have, the slower and more prone to corruption your file gets. In addition, if you try to do a search over a 64 meg region, it's quite a bit slower than over a much smaller area. My suggestion is to break your desired areas into portions that will fit within the 64 meg limits. If you have to upload 3 or 4 60-something meg maps, that's ok. Switching from one map to another is a matter of a few button presses. Regarding the square/rectangular region shapes. Yeah, that's a drag... but if you're creative, you can use four regions to cover the entire area you're interested in. Jamie I think I have it right. I have 4 maps (regions) of just under 16 megs for a total of 60 some megs. My problem is that the 4 map limit and the fact that I can only use rectangular regions caused me to cover areas that I'm not interested in and leave areas that I wanted to cover, uncovered. not familiar with that map package. The TOPO US allows 30mb regions and I think up to 4 (or 6) per map (there is probably a total map size kimit too). The Direct Route package allows only 1 region, but up to 64mb and that can be hacked. You can place as many map files on your SD card as will fit and the Meridians don't care, you just have to switch maps when you want a different one, a few clicks is all that is required. To get multiple maps on the SD card requires renaming the file on your HD and using a card reader to write the file to the card.

Somewhat off topic, but in my area the dollar store has just become the $1.25 store. Anyone else have that happening?

I think it is a terrific idea, but if you are going to have someone travel 100 miles to do your cache please spend some time making it worth the trip. As an example perhaps you will want to plan on a stop every 30 minutes or less at some area that is worthy of visiting and a cache/coord will be waiting there. Planning the route along some state listed scenic route would also be nice as the scenery will be good and all you need to mention in your cache decription is the name of the state route and folks can research it on their own and make their own plans for the trip. I probably wouldn't do a cache such as you are describing unless there was something on the cache page that convinced me that I was in for a guided tour that I would want to remember or at least bring my camera along on in which case I would love such a cache. Lot's of potential.

Agreed this is a limiting factor although being able to recharge the 17 hour battery in the unit is nice. The explorists have unlimited waypoints via the SD card and they now have a geocaching manager that works like you would expect a Windows app to. I hear it is really slick, but haven't used it yet myself. I am pretty sure they do although I have never tried this to confirm. I suspect the geocaching manager resolves this although even with the Meridian line you can sort waypoints alphabetically and according to how near they are. With the alpha sort entering an 'r' jumps to waypoints beginning with R. Yeah, I have a Meridian with a 64mb SD card and have to admit it holds all I need it to, but I don't travel much. If I traveled I would get a larger SD card. Explorists also have USB ports I would say that is fairly subjective, but... True, although pressing goto twice to reroute isn't much of a hassle in practice. I kind of like having the control over when it reroutes, but that is individual preference. That isn't true anymore. I think it might be the software that handles this rather than the unit. With the Direct Route Software (their newest map product that does the auto routing) restauraunts and other POI types are sorted by type. I forget how many food categories they have, but I discovered there are food types I never even heard of when looking through all the categories ;-) Editted to add: Chosing a first unit can be a difficult task, but rest assured that both units you are looking at are great units and you will be happy with either (unless you travel alot in which case the Magellan with it's SD card offers a distinct advantage). One factor to consider is that once you buy into a manufacture's line you will likely purchase software and accessories for it. When you decide to upgrade down the road that is something to keep in mind as buying a new unit with the same manufacturer can potentially save you money on software and accessories although future compatibility isn't guaranteed.

Kids can do all sorts of things far younger than most imagine, it is simply about having the opportunity/exposure and being supportive rather than demanding/critical. I have a 5 year old (almost 6) that likes to hold the GPSr when we are out. I didn't give him any more instructions other than "the arrow is us, the way it is pointing is the direction we are going and this square is where the cache is". As we walk along he will hit a button, something happens and he asks how to fix it or what it means. I show him and we continue on. He just picks up the stuff over time. His natural curiousity causes him to try things and ask questions and as a result he learns. I don't think there is any age too young to put a GPSr in the hands of a kid, just let them figure things out at whatever pace they figure things out at. Also if they are really young (lets arbitrarily say 8 or younger) don't be surprised when they are super excited initially and later show more interest in sticks and bugs. As long as they are allowed to hold the unit when they wish they will learn at their own pace and become mini cachers fairly quickly.

Caches are labeled according to the size of the container. A micro is the smallest sized container and pill bottles and film containers are typical containers used and represent the usual size. They can be even smaller though. When you view a cache listing on Geocaching.com there is a picture right under the difficulty rating that is 5 boxes with one being red. This indicates the size of the cache container you will find at that cache. The sizes are micro, small, regular, large and x large or something along those lines. 99% of the caches listed are in the first 3 sizes. A micro is around film container size, a small is around the size of a soap dish or peanut butter jar and a regular is something around the size of a 30 or 50 cal ammo can.