DavisFamily

I spent $17 and that's it. I think I've seen someone else who spent less.

That is gorgeous! Well done Wife and Happy Birthday!

I got my Nuvi 200 for FREE after learning about this offer here. (http://www.mygpsoffer.com/?cid=61136&affid=1850745797:_free%20gps) I love this gps! I'm sure the more expensive ones do much, but we are THRILLED with this user-friendly, efficient and accurate gps.

It's a great unit for geocaching. They are very accurate but sometimes suffer from the "slingshot" effect. When I used to cache with my Meridian I would stop and pause for a second or two between 50 and 100 feet from the cache. All was good then. If you don't do that and you are moving along pretty good heading toward a cache you will all of a sudden find your self passing the cache by a hundred feet or so. This is the slingshot as it takes the unit a few seconds to catch up sometimes. So a quick pause when nearing the cache is sometimes necessary. Other than that the gold is a very good unit and probably the most popular gps out there at one time. I will second this. We've had our Meridian Gold for over 3.5 years and it's been very accurate for geocaching. I do think it doesn't get you in quite as close as Garmin's might with the zoom feature. However, with triangulating we've had good success. Enjoy!

I actually think I figured it out! I'm still not sure what I did, but I was able to do it. I limited it to 200 and fiddled with the different export options. Somehow it worked! NOW, if I could only get it to send 500 caches, instead of just 200. I was able to do it with EasyGPS. Anyone?

Forget the serial transfer stuff. Buy a 1 gig SD card and an SD card reader. From GSAK do and export to Magellan SD card and save to the SD card. plop the SD card in your unit and go to the card utilities menu and load the waypoints into main memory from there. That does sound much easier than the frustration I've been going through. I should have saved my $ on buying the serial-to-USB cord. Ah well. Thanks for your input!

We've been geocaching for years, but I have never been able to get my Magellan Meridian gold to communicate with a computer. I decided to give it a go again recently and I was able to get it to communicate with a desktop computer we have. Unfortunately, my GSAK is on my laptop. I purchased a serial-to-USB cable but I still haven't been able to figure out how to export to my GPSr. I have read the help menu on GSAK, searched the forums and found help for other Meridian GPSrs, but the answers don't seem to fit the problem that I'm having. Help! (please!) ETA: To see if I was able to get it to communicate at all, I downloaded EasyGPS and was able to send 500 caches to my GPSr. I still can't figure out how to do it with GSAK, so I am still interested in assistance. Thanks in advance!

Wow I am so happy to see 11 reply's already. I can't wait to check out my options. Thank you all for giving me the lowdown. I am sure I will be back with a few more questions when I figure out which will work for me and my service (Verizen) Happy caching! Chinster Sorry, I should have been clearer. This does not have a GPSr, so I still carry my GPS. It's still such a great piece of equipment, I love it!

I have a Palm Centro that is rapidly becoming indispensible to me. Its document viewer allows you to read Microsoft Word, Excel, and Power Point files. For a well spent $8, I purchased the Cache Mate program on it and have downloaded every cache in a 20+ mile radius. Finally, after years of geocaching, I'm paperless! It's $99 or less through both Sprint and Verizon, not sure who else. Happy Hunting!

This probably isn't what you're looking for, but last month I got a Palm Centro, smart phone. I love it more each day. Finally I'm able to paperless geocache using CacheMate, well worth the $8! I use it for tons of additional things and since it's my phone, it's pretty much always on me.

I love these pictures, makes me wish I could do more traveling. Here are two from some of my favorite caches ever, probably because I was in the most beautiful place in the world (so far), Maui. Firecracker Beach Beyond Venus (my mom)

A few of the ones that have stumped me for a while... a magnetic sheet with large letters on it that appeared to be official on a cable box. The back of the magnet sheet was the log. Another was an ammo can and the coords took you to a driveway alongside a partially abandoned strip mall. We searched forever before I finally figured out the meaning of the name and realized it was a miniature ammo can and found it hidden underneath a fire hydrant.

Hmm, I'm having trouble seeing the tutorials. I keep getting the error page. Is it just me?

You'll have such a great time! We were there in April and hit several caches inbetween snorkeling, shopping, eating, ahhh. Wish I could go back, but I digress. The best cache we saw while we were there was Beyond Venus. It's on the drive to Hana and round the back way. If you want other suggestions, feel free to e-mail me. Have Fun!!

I did this and then when it finally arrived and I ripped it from the box, it was broken! I think my wails are still echoing through the hills and valleys. I ended up buying through Amazon for my 2nd go-around. Whew, those days of waiting were painful.

I like small because at first glance it is very obvious where it fits in the size range. To me it's unclear which would be smaller, a mini or a micro. The same thing with some of the other suggestions such as irregular or... rats, I forget what the other one was.

I agree, I didn't mean to imply that they were aware of the bees. I meant I was surprised others on this forum hadn't mentioned the bee problem with caches. And I did nicely write a warning note for the cache owner and other potential hiders. Unfortunately the nest is quite close to the cache and didn't require much walking around at all to get them worked up. I think I'm starting to hate bees more than snakes! No snakes have attacked us while caching. The last cache with bees the owner was very good about dealing with the problem. Another one where we saw active wasp nests hasn't been dealt with.

I'm surprised I haven't seen many mentions of caches with active bee hives. Today we ran into our third in a little over a month with a lot of active bees or wasps, and we aren't hard core cachers. Recently my 6 yr developed an anaphylactic reaction after being stung at one cache. Today two of my other kids were stung and I had two bees crawling all over me. One ended up in our van. Four hysterical kids crying and one pretty shook up mother. It's just not worth a trip to the ER.

Well, we didn't go to the ER after my 6 yr old was stung by 3 bees recently while caching, but the pediatrician slapped my hand later for not going! This is where 15 yrs of pediatric ICU experience can sometimes be bad for your kids. We weren't aware he had an allergy til after the stings that day. We had calmed him down and were rifling through the cache when I noticed he was turning bright red and breaking out in head-to-toe hives. Thankfully we did have liquid Benadryl on hand as a part of my daughter's allergy kit, so I gave him a good dose and we left. As we were driving towards home (and away from the hospital) he complained that his throat felt like it had thorns in it. Eek. My husband thought the swelling was going down so we opted against the ER. Ok, ok, now I know, bad idea. Next time. Today while bagging a FTF two of my other kids were stung! I'm so thankful that the 6 yr old wasn't stung since I know it could be much worse the next time. Sigh. I have some family members who want us to give up geocaching because of this. Maybe wait til cold weather sets in? So to answer the question, no, we haven't gone but yes, we should have.

When we hid our first cache in a county park with an extremely reluctant-to-approve naturalist, our clue was cryptic. The first few people out to find it didn't, and trampled a lot of vegetation while trying. Because the park people were so fussy and hard to deal with I figured we'd quickly lose our permit if this continued. Thus, I made the clue more specific "under the boulder on the uphill side." I always appreciate a helpful clue when I've gone to a lot of work trying to find a cache. Just IMHO, I feel quite aggravated when we've hiked a long ways with our young children and the hint is not helpful.

Sorry, I don't think I was clear enough. We could see our track but apparently not zoomed in enough to read anything. It also looked like it had merged our wanderings into one large track. After reading the logs the other day, I checked the track settings and did change one thing but it didn't make a difference for the track markings from that cache. We really like our MeriGold. For every other cache, it's been right on and easy enough to follow the tracks on the way out. But apparently, it's not the best for this kind of a cache. Thanks for the help!

Oops, looks like our family's gonna have to up the count one more in the spring!

The other day we attempted a creative cache where there were 31 different compass headings we had to walk at the prescribed # of paces for each. When we finished, we were supposed to be able to view numbers that we had paced off and would then enter those #'s into the coords. This would have given us the final cache location. Unfortunately, we couldn't view anything when we finished. We weren't certain if this was due to not being able to zoom in any further. Although heading read the above thread, it seems like this is the way Magellans track? Any help? Thanks!

Why not? This was recommended to me by someone who had visited my cache and I've seen others in bags. My cache is a tupperware-style container as ammo box caches are forbidden in the park.

We went through an absurd amount of effort obtaining permission to place a cache in one of our county parks. It took four weeks for the naturalist to visit the cache. By that time, there was a wildflower bloom all around our cache and we were unkindly asked, "Were you AWARE that you placed your cache in the middle of a wildflower bloom?" We kindly reminded them that when the cache was placed a month prior, there were only dead leaves and dirt there. So we moved it and waited several more weeks before finally obtaining the permit. We noticed this summer, some local cachers placed a cache in another one of the county parks, not realizing the proper channels they were supposed to have gone through. Somehow the park PTB discovered the cache and promptly busted them. After several weeks, their cache is finally back up and running again. I don't really know what the point of my story is, just be aware that you may get busted if there was a protocol you were supposed to follow. The real bummer is that their permits are only good each year til Dec. 31st then we have to move the cache and go through the entire stinking process again.