Ex nihil

When in Rome... I set my GPS to metres in Australia, where I work. I set it to yards and miles in the UK where my folks live. I set it as for Australia when in the rest of Europe. I set it to nautical miles when I'm sailing. I haven't taken it to the USA yet but I guess when I do I'll set it miles and feet. If my topo map vertical scale is in feet I use that, if its in metres I use that. Keep flexible go with the local show.

If you moved to GSAK I think your problems would go away.

Now, I've bought two brands of self adhesive screen protector for my Meridian at great expense, applied them with scrupulous care and I have ended up ripping them both off and throwing them away because the screen visibility is so degraded. Before I blow even more cash on these invisibleshield things can someone out there tell me that they can still read their screen properly?

I have the old Meridian, which is a model or two before yours and it is absolutely suitable for what you want, you have done well. It is also completely indestructable despite all my best eforts to smash it up on bush trips. Once you have an SD card in it, (I've got 512 Mb and I've never filled it all up even though I have the whole of Australia, World Basemap and a zillion waypoint and track files on it) it will handle your waypoints just fine. Without a SD card GSAK can load your waypoints OK but you'll just have to put up with the one set on your screen until you get back to the PC. Previous comment about GSAK is spot on. Get an SD card, a cable and GSAK and go.

I don't know what unit you are using but I have that problem with my Meridian if I forget to do the following: Save the track onto the GPS under a discrete name, delete the track from the screen, tunr off tracking. If you don't the track will jump when you turn it on to download to PC.

I just hate to see you guys going to all this trouble fiddling around with maybe-it'll-work base grade software. Uninstall Mapsource and go get GSAK.

You will find applications that will sort of do it for you for free but mostly what you will get is just routes masquerading as tracks. If you want any kind of accurate control over tracks you will have to buy some mapping software. I have tried a few and I now use Oziexplorer exclusively. It isn't free like you want, it's about $80 I think, but it will save you a lot more thsan $80 worth of frustration and pain and as you use it you will realise you can do a whole lot of things you wanted to do but didn't know you could. I use only two applications with my GPS, GSAK manages all my waypoints and it talks to Oziexplorer which manages all my maps and lets me design and manipulate tracks. I go trekking and I can draw very detailed tracks up to 2,000 points each off 1:50,000 topos in Oziexplorer then upload them to GPS where they appear as part of the map. In reverse I map unrecorded trails in GPS and then go home and edit them in Oziexplorer. In trekking I've never actually found a use for routes but I do use tracks a heap. I have used routes occasionaly for marine navigation. Oziexplorer will talk to any GPS unit I should think. Look at http://www.oziexplorer.com

I know you wanted it free but save yourself a lot of heartache and just get GSAK anyway. Try it awhile; you can actually use it free if you put up with the nag screen after 21 days. If you like it its only $20 to buy. I use it as a database to sort out all my waypoints then from GSAK I can upload to GPS or send waypoints off to mapping aplications such as Oziexplorer or DiscoverAus or write them to a flash card or Excel or whatever I want. It also connects waypoints with their webpages and open them directly in your mapping software if you want. Its really what you need all in one box and it is constantly evolving and getting better all the time. Love it. Go to http://gsak.net/

This feature is excellent, I used it immediately on an existing cache in Alice Springs, Australia 'Top Red Centre' GCJ703 because it involves climbing a slightly dodgy escarpment and I get people to pass through safe waypoints en route so they don't take a straight GPS line and fall off something. My only problem was with waypoint types, I ended up labelling all three points as 'trailhead' but they aren't really, just points on a route. If we can't use the category'waypoints' can we perhaps add the category 'trailpoints' or better, 'trackpoints'? Also the little double signpost icon is just fine for 'trackpoints' if we had this category perhaps the 'trailhead' icon could have an icon with just one sign on the post. Thanks Jeremy.

Jeremy has it right. Choice is the thing and Jeremy I do think it is worth the effort in the interests of international relations. Every computer application I have that uses dates has a user choice, even my GPS and camera and sometimes I have to get everything into one format before they can talk to each other. Whatever is decided it may be wise to keep it numerical, Excel spreadsheets don't always handle alpha/numericals predictably. Being in Australia we use dd/mm/yy or since Y2K, dd/mm/yyyy and yyyy-mm-dd is often used because Windows easily date sorts files this way. None of these formats present a problem because they go from small to big or big to small and they are obvious and computers can date sort them either way. The US convention is the only one that causes confusion because it goes big/small/bigger and computers can't sort them, but we can handle any way of doing it. After the September 11 event I think a lot of people around the planet were saying "Where do they get 911 from?' The US way is pretty much a peculiarity of the US and Canada and it does present problems to the rest of us.

This topic must have come up before but I can't find it and the search button doesn't seem to be working for me this morning -apologies if I'm dredging up ancient stuff. Can we add watchlist to gpx files as GSAK has this potentially useful column but it is not supported?

I don't know what is happening with WAAS in Australia, only that I know something is. I am used to seeing WAAS on my Meridian in the UK where the WAAS sat. appears in the far SW and doesn't appear to improve the EPE, I've never seen it in Australia. On 18 November 100k south of Darwin I started getting WAAS fixes and WAAS averages for the first time ever in Australia. To start with the GPS flicked 100 here, 100m over there on a clear dry day, then it crashed and turned itself off. On reboot the WAAS sat had disappeared and things went back to normal. Two hours later I got WAAS back for the rest of the day and EPEs consistently 4-5m under wet trees. today no WAAS as per usual, just the empty w marker in the sky. I've looked around the net under everything from Federal aviation to USD but not a hint. Plenty of comment that Australia will never get WAAS most seem to stem from gpsoz; I think they are about to be proved wrong. Love to know if anyone has anything better than furphys.

Isonzo has an interesting observation about the number of watchers and this is certainly worth noting and is an indication that something interesting is happening here. However, the example given in Florida, although this is clearly an ace cache, is partly a function of the population density. I have a cache at Top Red Centre but it is in the middle of the Northern Territory of Australia, size of Texas, population 280,000 and I don't think we actually have 12 active cachers in the entire state! We rely on a few backpackers for any kind of traffic at all. Our caches will never get the numbers. I have four watchers even so but I suspect it may be because of the Emergency Unit 911 travel bug that's there now.

Emergency Unit 911 must be one be one of the most successful TBs. Starting in the UK its mission was to go to Australia to rescue a platypus, and it did just that, photos to prove it and all. It is now resting on top of a mountain ridge in the desert in the centre of Australia at Top Red Centre waiting for some one to collect.

I don't really want a rating system for every cache for many of the reasons given above but I really would like to see the 'golden caches'. Some caches are just so transcendently superior to the others that they must be visited whatever your personal tastes if only because they are shining examples of their type. In the Northern Territory, Australia we only have 31 caches in the entire State and I've known people to drive 600+kms just to get to one; I myself hired a 4WD out of Alice Springs just to collect a couple and took all day doing it - but will it be worth it? Most cache opportunities for me are brief work related visits to other States, but where to go in the 2 spare hours in Melbourne after that meeting? I suggest that: 1. You get to nominate a cache as a Gold Cache once every 30 cache logs if you want to. 2. You cannot nominate your own caches. 3. Caches are marked as Gold Caches only for as long as the number of nominations for it exceed 20% of the total finds. 4. No cache can be a Gold Cache until it has at least five finds. 5. It is either a Gold Cache or it isn't, no algorithm more complicated than is Nominations/Total Finds>0.2? and is Total Finds >5? This should result in about one Gold Cache for the entire Northern Territory assuming Territorians are dojng caches at least as good as anyone else, which wouldn't exactly be overdoing it but it might make that 600km 4WD pilgrimage to do the one way out in the desert somewhere a realistic proposition.

Well, I've read all of the above and blown away hours and hours stuffing around with GPX and PLT files and I have come to the conclusion that GPX does not do TRACKS all it does is ROUTES. ROUTES are just a series of waypoints linked together with straight lines, a TRACK draws a detailed line as in a map and contain thousands of points, which cannot, as far as I am aware be isolated and used as waypoints in any straighforward way, (that is you could use OziExplorer to extract a TRACK point and convert it into a waypoint and then use it in a ROUTE but you can't just set a bearing to the next track point and you can't do it within your GPS). I suspect that a lot of confusion and head scratching in this thread is because: 1. Although everyone has seen and used a ROUTE not all have seen a TRACK because not all GPSs handle TRACKS. 2. Maybe what Garmin and Magellan call a TRACK are two different things but I haven't got a Garmin so can't see I am just getting htis picture from what the Garmin owners are saying. OziExplorer PLT files do TRACKS, Oziexplorer RTE files do ROUTES.

I wish I could read what tiura just said. Most Euorpean languages I can work out something but Finnish is a total magical mystery. Is Nightwish coming to Australia? Did they come and I missed it?

Ok so we have two for Oz, some Norwegian stuff, UK topos, bits of NZ, maybe SA, the various maritime ones; how about we try a global catalogue of this stuff and show where to get it since Magfellan won't?

I believe that is all there is. There is heaps on USA, the one you have found on Europe, DiscoverAus and Desert Tracks Australia for Oz, bits of NZ but not all of it and I think something for South Africa. For some reason Magellan have not attempted to collate these resources despite it being in their in own interests to do so and there is no website I am aware of that puts all the Mapsend resources together. World Wide Basemap has considerable detail for some countries but probaly not enough for your purposes. The Australian Magellan site seems to have more useful info than the USA site being a little less USA-centric. I wanted to make a map for East Timor but Magellan don't make it easy. They might get some results if they open sourced the map making gear.

Welcome to the fold. Nobody can tell you, it's personal choice. Everyone will tell you they either love or hate the one they have now and all the comments will totally contradict each other. There are a few threads in this forum that will help you though, suggest you work through them. Whatever you get make sure that it talks to your PC.

Travel Bug 'Minnie', TBGKG8, from Australia is trying to get to a Nightwish concert in Finland and has made it to Denmark. She doesn't speak the language, is concerned that it is rude to speak English all the time and needs a translator. Anyone want to translate the bug sheet into Suomi and email to the owner? Currently in Tirpitz2, TB details at http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?id=84299 Current GOAL: I started my journey on the top of a ridge in a desert in the very centre of Australia. It would make me very happy to go to a Nightwish concert because my owner loves their music but Nightwish have never been to Australia. I would then like to go home to Darwin, Australia. My best chance is if I could get to Finland. If someone could get me to Scandinavia or Northern Europe that would help. I would love to hear from you what Nightwish is like in concert but I don't speak Suomi so you will have to tell me in English. I would also like to go to Egypt on the way there or back, or maybe on my next trip. Can you help me? I don't mind going to any other places on the way or how long it takes, I'd just like your company. Listen to some Nightwish on www.nightwish.com. If someone wanted to translate this into Suomi that would be really neat. About this item: Small, soft poodle answers to the name of Minnie. My owner is a girl called Verity, she wishes she could go to a Nightwish concert but it will be a long time before they come to Australia so she is sending me instead. Keep me away from your compass because I've got magnetic paws.

Travel bug maps. When viewing the map I just get a grey screen with an orange marker somewhere in it with a log number on it. Unless it happens to be near some coastline there is no way of telling where it is or what it is doing. There doesn't seem to be a way of zooming. Because the map tells me nothing useful at all I go to the Old Map which starts zoomed on the whole journey, which may be the entire planet, and no way to zoom to the detail. Is this actually functioning correctly or am I being really, really stupid? What I would like to see is two buttons, "Whole Journey" and "Last three logs" with the map detail automatically adapting to the size of the map, maybe in three levels with State and Country boundaries over 2,000kms and small towns, rivers and park boundaries at 200kms. Pre-existing map images could be used to make this work after the manner of OziExplorer. I appreciate that there is a lot of work to make this happen and that a lot of work has already gone into making this work as well as it does.

I am not sure that WAAS is all that useful, in or out of the USA. For Australians who might be checking out this thread look at the interesting explanation at http://www.gpsoz.com.au/WAAS.htm

Interesting question, I first got into this website a long time ago looking for routes for trekking, I was not back then in the market for geocaching, which relies on individual waypoints. I just thought that people with good trekking routes would want to share them and that there would be some track trading somewhere on the net. I am still looking, it doesn't seem to have happened and I think it is because there is no standardisation for track formats and that this is an unfilled market. I think there is some confusion between Waypoints, Routes and Tracks, they are different things and this is not helped by the inconsistent use of nomenclature across GPSs. 1 Waypoints are just locations, if you want to trade Waypoints use GPX files and handle them with GSAK, you can use EasyGPS but there are limitations and once you have used GSAK you won't want to go back to EasyGPS, I uninstalled mine. 2 Routes are generally just Waypoints set up in some sort order, a GPX format would carry the waypoint data but I don't see how it would put them in order. OziExplorer uses RTE files and can be used to trade routes but I don't think that routes is what we need for trekking they are only good for flying a plane or navigating a boat because you can go in straight lines between Waypoints. 3 If you are trekking though Routes is not want you want, you want tracks. A track typically has thausands of points defined in them. OziExplorer uses PLT files for this and talks to any GPS. I would suggest OzExplorer PLT files would make a good standard. If you are into tracks you must be doing this in association with some mapping software and you can't go past OziExplorer for starters. I have not found an easy way to convert Tracks from one format to another except by uploading to a GPS and downloading them into another application. There is a market out there for something to trade and convert tracks and I don't think there is currently the solution.

WorldWide Basemap1.01 requires a patch to work with XP Service Pack2. I cannot remember what it does but I put the patch on anyway and it works. The patch was WWB specific and you get it from Magellan site free. Q: are there issues with other Mapsend products? I have DiscoverAus. If so, what are the problems and where can we find a patch?