EMarkM

Just updated firmware to 3.1, having noticed the spinning compass whilst on our otherwise fabulous Dorset holiday a couple of weeks ago. We'll be caching some time over the next four days, both at home in Cheshire and down in Harefield, so we'll see how the new firmware gets on. Good luck to everyone with their new Oregons.

Walts, ah thanks for that: confirms my suspicions Will continue to just log straight onto my phone instead then. Cheers.

Gah! Think I might be confused again. Really enjoying using our Oregon 600 on our two week camping trip in Dorset, England. BUT, where the heck do we read the mini-logs that we typed into a few of the caches we found? I tried and tried to find them last night, but they were nowhere to be seen! If, for instance, I go to the cache details from the main Geocaching button, there is nothing there for "view log" and if I press "log" it looks like I'm logging for the first time: my previous notes are not there. Help! (And thanks!!)

To Blackrose 67: ah, that'll be good news for fans of that system, thanks for the extra info.

The old advice was, "of COURSE a dedicated GPSr is going to be more accurate; what were you thinking?" Well, mobile phone and computing devices have come a long way and, as has already been pointed out, a large part of the "accuracy" is reliant upon the person who placed the cache and you have no control over what device they used! We use our iPhone 5 for caching but have always used a dedicated unit for the principal field device due to the reasons mentioned above - ruggedness, waterproofness and battery-life. Your phone or tablet will get you there, and will allow you to log your find online or refresh the most recent logs for caches you saved a while ago, but it will not survive contact with the great outdoors for long. Our iPhone comes out when we get safely back to the vehicle or base camp for logging purposes only. Hope this helps. BTW, I don't think any dedicated GPSr units run anything like an Android OS.

Very true. Well, I just downloaded the latest firmware upgrade - Garmin seem to be doing these fairly regularly at the moment, so maybe that is a feature that will get added. Thanks again for your time. <~~Still secretly wondering about putting those .GPX files on our maps card...it did work...don't want to mess anything up though...

To Splashy and Red: thanks also for your prompt and informative replies. Whilst waiting, I did a little experiment, and I have to say that I COULD put my .GPX files on my SD card, even though it is a pre-filled map card. Must be a recent change to the system that allows one to do this, perhaps? Anyway, with everything you guys said in mind, I have decided not to store the .GPX files on the map card anyway. Sounds like I could be letting myself in for problems if I somehow managed to corrupt or lose the map files, even if I had taken a backup copy on the Mac. So, we'll stick to leaving the GC waypoints on the main unit, along with all the usual manual waypoints that will get added and removed from there over time. Many thanks all for your contributions: any further enlightenment from anyone else is still appreciated Happy caching. The UK is actually getting a bit of summer this week!

Thanks very much for your quick reply. As long as other users are seeing the same thing, I'm not too worried. We wouldn't want to use the Geocaching button itself until we were fairly near GZ anyway, but it is annoying that this doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. Anyway, thanks again.

Well, I don't think you can lock the screen, but you can turn it off. I've added that functionality to the master key: double-push and it turns of, one push and it's back on. Works for me. Regards Anann Guys, maybe I'm wrong about what you're getting at, but you can certainly lock the screen, in the same way that you can with a Nokia phone handset. I have configured our buttons so that a single tap of the Power key just turns the screen off, yes, but double-clicking it takes us to the System Status page (you have to have this as either your single- or double-click on this button IIRC) and, once you're there, there is a little padlock button that leaves the screen on but locks it to prevent accidental gestures having an effect. Any use?

Long-time cachers, long-time Garmin users here but new to the Oregon series, or in fact any of these new-fangled "can display a map" GPSr units! Couple of questions. I have had a search around first, but couldn't find anything relevant; hope someone can offer advice. 1. We want to follow the advice of storing the .GPX files on the SD card rather than on the unit itself, due to it seemingly being a way to conquer annoying waypoint indexing problems and so-on, but we have a concern. The SD card in our unit is the one with our rather expensive GB Ordnance Survey map on. There's plenty of room left for hundreds of geocache files but we don't want to endanger the map files themselves. Are we definitely OK to move the .GPX files to this volume rather than placing them in the GARMIN/GPX folder on the unit? 2. With that in mind, is it possible to copy the map files to the unit instead so that they are safely off the card? If not, is it OK to back these files up on my iMac so that, if lost, we can simply copy them back onto the unit's SD card? (Can you tell I work in IT database security and am a little paranoid?) 3. Has anyone experienced the Oregon only showing nearby caches, even with no filters set? We have four pocket queries that run every week for about 400 GCs that are within a ten mile radius of home. This week I also added a PQ for our imminent holiday about 150 miles from home. All this week's .GPX files have been copied successfully to the Oregon, everything shows up in the Waypoints section and even on the map if we pan over to the remote location, but the actual "Geocaching" button only seems to show targets that are less than ten miles from home. Any and all comment would be appreciated - there's a good chance that I'm (Mark) just confused and wrong but we can't let Nicola know that, can we?

Many, many thanks for this - it's exactly what I had imagined! I've set up three notifications now, for "published" trads, unknowns and multis in our five mile radius - just what I needed. Now all I need to do is figure out how I could have found this out on my own. Happy Caching EMM

Hullo Folks! Been caching for years on-and-off, but one thing continues to puzzle us. Quite often we see FTF logs that indicate that a cacher "knew" that a new cache was about to be placed in a particular location, and that they even received an email the moment the cache got published. Is this something clever that folk are doing with Pocket Queries, or is there some other advanced search method that I have missed on the website so far? We'd love to be part of the FTF race, knowing that a new cache was about to be launched just around the corner! Many thanks in anticipation. EMarkM Team

Bear and Ragged, thank you very much for your prompt reply. I'll see if MacCaching has a similar feature, and, if not, will d/load GSAK onto my XP partition and Nicola's laptop. Cheers, and good hunting all!

Hope I'm doing the right thing by hijacking this thread rather than starting a new one! (Please forgive me if not.) My new Garmin eTrex H arrived this morning, and it will be a few days before my data cable arrives, so I've been merrily typing in a few caches by hand. My question is this: I wish to use the official GC number for each of the waypoints I create, as in "GC1GN62", but I don't think enough characters are available in the name space on the Garmin, so for now I have been grouping them together by using the "+" sign, so all my cache marks look like "+1GN62", for instance. When I get my data cable, and load the points in automatically (presumably by using MacCaching, GSAK or Easy GPS), what will the names look like on the GPSr when they arrive? I'm now a premium member, and am hoping to load quite a few caches at once, and I'd like to know what to expect with those names. Is it something you set in the software before transferring them over? I'd appreciate any replies!

Our new eTrex H arrived this morning ::excited:: and I have ordered a cable from Amazon that I'm hoping will do the trick for us. I usually use the Mac, but might well use Nicola's laptop for sending co-ords to the GPSr as that's the computer that's connected to a printer at the moment. If I do end up trying my new cable on the Mac, I'll add more to this thread.