NeilFord

Woooo Hooooo!!!! Timestamps, menus, loads of other great features. Now I just need to replace my 3870 with something that runs 2003 Waiting with baited breath... - Neil

Congrats! 33 is definitely an achievement. I won't be attempting to beat that anytime soon :-) - Neil.

Yep, a big thanks to all the adopters and a big thank you to Perthos for placing them all in the first place. So the next challenge is all 51 Perthos originated caches in one day? :-) - Neil.

I should add that this isn't a problem with G:UK but with the MXF format and how programs like Memory Map handle duplicate waypoints. More later.... - Neil.

GC.com limits the number of downloads to reduce the load on their servers. A pocket query for 2500+ records could well bring it to it's knees :-) The trick is to pick major cache centers and run queries based around them. Streetmap can help you come up with suitable co-ordinates/postcodes. If you use any digital mapping software, the GUK searches can be useful for creating waypoints, though I've found some niggles there, expect a post on that very subject (with possible solutions) soon. - Neil.

GUK unfortunately doesn't provide the ability to download GPX files. I suspect it's part of their arrangement with gc.com. To get GPX files you'll need premium membership of gc.com. The closest you can get it to download and EasyGPS LOC file which will give you the very basics of the cache info. - Neil.

I'll admit to being a little behind on logging cache finds, however we *always* try to log TB movements the same day, even if that means logging the drop off manually. I appreciate however that this isn't always possible for everyone and that the occasional gap will appear. I just think it's the nature of the beast. I agree that the best course of action is to try emailing the people who dropped it off first. If no response, then consider grabbing it. Just my 0.2p worth. - Neil.

Hopefully OzGuff (43 London caches in one overnight run) and Seasider (40 London caches in one day) will be along shortly to provide some London powercaching advice. My pieces of advice would be: Buy an A-Z, bring a torch and use Streetmap before you travel to plot the caches. And be prepared to tackle some of the caches in the twilight hours, it's just a lot quieter then ;-) Always happy to meet fellow cachers for a drink or to do some joint caching. - Neil.

Though I haven't done it myself, The Little Cemetery Safari (GCHPYY) comes highly recommended. Must make time to do this sometime. - Neil.

For cheap SD cards Valueflash seem to have some of the best prices around, £100 inc VAT for a 512Mb Dane-Elec card. They even beat my regular supplier in Australia (PowerInNumbers) who always were the cheapest place around. I have also seen some PC Worlds with the PNY 512Mb cards for the same price, though not all of them. - Neil.

Maybe someone on here can be persuaded to take you caching. Where roughly are you in the UK (county will do)? And thanks for emailing, Home Truths, it's one of the things that piqued my interest to find out more :-) - Neil.

If you hadn't said Glasgow I'd have said yes, no problem :-) No that there is anything wrong with Glasgow, I worked there for two years. It's just a little far. Though Easyjet flights aren't too expensive. Care to lay on accomodation and transport around? Assuming of course you don't get a better offer ;-) - Neil.

Slowness on a Pocket PC is nearly always down to memory problems, though a reset usually cures that. Use the slider in the memory settings to allocate more memory to programs and see if that improves things. Moving files off onto a storage card may be a requirement to free up some memory. I would also suggest Googling for some more suggestions. - Neil.

Thank you both for the replies. I suspect a copy of Memory Map Region 2 will be going up for sale real soon :-) - Neil.

I'm interested in talking to anyone who has first hand experience of using the Fugwai mapping software with the provided OS maps. Although we have already invested in the local Memory Map products, Fugwai's ability to work with both Pocket PC and Palm is of great interest as my wife would like maps but doesn't really want to give up her Palm. The reviews I've read have been a little down on the user experience which is why I initially avoided them, but I'm re-investigating, hence looking for exisiting users. I'd be really inerested in meeting up with someone and getting some first hand experience. TIA. - Neil.

Oh that.... it's Nikon D100 plus vertical grip with 24-120 lens plus hood. The picture was taken Natalie, probably at the wide end of her 28-200. I actually don't lust after a 'Blad as I've embraced digital and medium format digital is just too darn expensive to be practical. Though if someone was to give me an H1 and digital back I wouldn't turn it away :-) Getting this slightly back on subject, I'm now the proud owner for a Geko 201, having relegated the Fortuna Clip-On to the in-car use only. - Neil.

I was seriously considering trying to escape this weekend to tackle this, but family commitments (and Natalie with a baseball bat and muttering something about wedding anniversary) have prevented that. So I'm up for it when you are next over. I now have a reliable gpsr, have invested in a head torch and will endeavour not to break any part of my anatomy between now and then :-) Congrats to Seasider btw.... funny understanding of the word retirement though. - Neil (who has Premium Membership under the SmudgyPixels ID).

For PDA protection I would suggest looking at Aquapac which whilst not ruggadised in the same way as the Otter boxes, do provide complete water protection and have neckstraps to help prevent the dropping issue. Their online store even quotes prices in good old sterling :-) A good site for reviews, etc. is Pocket GPS World. They have just reviewed the TomTom Navigator version 3 product. - Neil

[Warning - this is likely to be a long reply - Neil] Summary: My personal experience is that a PDA based GPSr system is a pain in the preverbial to use out caching. Works great in the car however. The detail: Firstly my background - I'm a 20 year IT professional now working as a Freelance Consultant. I work with a number of clients who travel a lot so have quite a bit of experience setting up and troubleshooting solutions using laptops, pdas, bluetooth, mobile phones, etc. I mainly work with Windows out of necessity (there are more Windows PCs to go wrong, so there is more work available), use an Apple Mac out of choice and own and have used a number of Palm OS and Pocket PC devices. I say all of this just so you know that if I say something is rubbish, it isn't based on just a five minute cursoury play. So on to the nitty gritty.... Having discovered geocaching only recently and being well equipped on the bluetooth enabled pda front as well as having a Nokia 6600 mobile phone., I decided to investigate bluetooth enabled gpsrs. After much research I settled on the Fortuna Clip-On as it had a removable Li-Ion battery (identical to one used by Nokia in some of it's phones) and supported XTrac. I tested the Fortuna with an iPaq 3870 running Vito Navigator II, GPSDash, VisualGPSce and GPSTuner, a Palm Tungsten|T running Compass and CacheNav and the Nokia 6600 running GPSDisp. As in car solutions they all worked very well, with GPSTuner working the best. It can take LOC files in to create waypoints, a very handy feature. I used this combination for the mad dash through Hertfordshire with OzGuff. However a days caching showed up the problems in the field. The receiver had a couple of bouts of not wanting to receive from the satallites and quite a number of bouts of not wanting to talk to the pda, not what you need when you're in the middle of a wood trying to find a cache, or more importantly the car! At the time I was using Cachemate on the Palm to log all the caches. It worked very well but did mean taking two pdas with me each time. That proved to be quite a juggling act when you're trying to sign the log, fill in Cachemate and make sure the iPaq doesn't lose connection with the gpsr, as that usually meant a reboot of both devices. So whilst we had a very successful day's caching, it proved to me that I need to be considering an alternative gpsr solution. I considered a Compact Flash based receiver. I already had the PCMCIA jacket for the iPaq and a PCMCIA->Compact Flash adapter, so it would only mean getting the receiver. However all of the CF receivers are quite bulky and with the jacket on the iPaq is already quite heavy. The potential to drop it would be too great. It also restricted me to using the iPaq and I much prefer to have options. I was also at the same time looking for mapping solutions. As I wanted OS maps, the ability to have them on a handheld and didn't want to fuss with scanning and calibrating my own maps, the two main contenders seemed to be Memory Map and Fugawi. Research brought to light a number of negative comments about Fugawi's user interface. Their website wasn't overly helpful with screenshots, not a good sign in my experience. It's one good point is that there was software for both Pocket PC and Palm, meaning more choice, which I consider a good thing. However, a quick look at the Memory Map products, the fact that they also did the A-Z Street Atlases and an indication that they were working on supporting the Palm platform, swung the decision. I became the proud owner of their OS Region 2 disc. That just left the issue of a GPSr. Even though I had committed to the iPag for mapping I still really wanted a platform independent solution. After much reading of reviews and checking of spec, and also taking into account we had just got my wife an eTrex Legend, I decided to go for the Geko 201. It has an almost identical spec to the Legend (sans mapping), can be hooked up to a computer or pda and is increadibly small, great when you are already carrying a load of stuff. I've used it on two caching trips and I'm very pleased with it. In order to lighten the load a little, I decided to look at cache management solutions on the iPaq and have settled on GPXSonar. It does a couple of things that I don't particularly like, but I've had a constructive dialog with the developer and I'm happy to commit to it as my cache management solution. That means that when I go caching, I take the Geko and the iPaq out of the car. I do have the cable to link the two and could use that to plot my accurate position on the maps, but haven't bothered. Much easier to just use the display on the Geko and manually refer to the map to avoid any obsticles. In the car I use a combination of the iPaq and the Fortuna. Being a wireless solution means less mess on the dash and if the iPaq is powered they commnicate quite happily indefinitely. Position tracking on the OS maps works really well. The Memory Map cds include the OS Road Atlas, though I've not had a chance to play with that yet. They don't seem to include any route planning functionality, but that's not a biggie as I have Autoroute for that. Alternatively I could pay for Wayfinder for the Nokia 6600 which provides route planning, voice direction and GPS integration as well as dynamically updated maps (they are downloaded from a server rather than being installed on the phone). So having waffled on, now to answer your question. Whilst the GPS72 is big and bulky, it does support NEMA (the protocol to provide the positioning feed to a computer or PDA), does have a data port and there are cables available to connect it to a number of devices (PCs, iPaqs, Palms, etc). You could invest in a PDA that has a mapping solution available for it and use the GPS to drive that in the car. The only problem would be that with both ports in use, it would not be possible to power either device. Of the two major contenders in route planning mapping there doesn't seem to be much to choose between CoPilot and Tom Tom. Any choice would probably come down to price and look and feel. Things that it's important to consider. The map files are big! For example: One full region of Memory Map OS maps are over 300Mb, which means using either 512Mb SD cards (still relatively expensive) or a Compact Flash card jacket and card, which adds to the bulk, though extra cards will be cheaper (and are availabel upto 4Gb). PDAs eat juice, especially if they are on constantly, even more so if the backlight is on. That's why it's advantageous to power them if you can. Iseem to remember seeing combined carcharger and data cables for the iPaqs somewhere which might go someway to alliviating the issue if you hooked it up to your GPS72. You can get jacket/sleeve gpsrs for both Palm and Pocket PC (mainly iPaqs), which is another route to consider. They obviously increase the bulk once again, which may defeat the object. Above all I would strongly recommend that you get to see as many solutions as possible, at least in order to get a feel for the weight and bulk you will be letting yourself in for. Given a blank sheet to start from I would probably suggest the following: Compaq iPaq with bluetooth built in Bluetooth GPSr for in car use Garmin Geko 201 for caching Ordanance Survey electronic maps (probably from Memory Map) Tom Tom Navigator 3 software for route planning and directions (as it appears you can't export Autoroute directions as waypoints/routes, at least not from the 2001 version) Enough SD memory cards to hold the Tom Tom maps and whatever OS maps you need so you don't have to keep deleting one or the other (it's a time consuming process writing 300Mb of map to a card) GPXSonar for cache management and logging (Having just has a quick look on Expansys, a possible alternative would be the Tom Tom Navigator 3 GPS for Poket PC which provides an external GPS receiver and cradle for in car use. Comes complete with the software too.) Apologies for such a long email, but once you get into this there so much to consider. I am more than happy to provide further advice, either on here or by email. Depending on your location I'm even happy to offer you the opportunity to have a play with all the kit I've got to get a feel for the pros and cons. A GPS72<->iPaq cable would set you back just under £30 from GPSW if you fancied trying out hooking up your existing unit. Hopefully all of this has been of some help. Regards Neil.

Fabien I fully understand the 'Life getting in the way' thing and as I said in my previous post, I appreciate all the work you've done so far. I'll await news on 1.2 with baited breath. You can expect me to be at the head of the queue when it comes to release time. BTW - that can be as long away as it takes. I will commit to GPXSonar now knowing that changes will happen. If I come up with any other bright ideas, I'll post a feature request in the appropriate place. Thank you for listening, not all software developers do. If you'll excuse me, I have some caching to organise :-) - Neil.

That's unlikely to come with time when you can easily do that already by editing the cache note as you go. In which case I'm missing something. If I enter a note, maybe to add information discovered as part of a multi, and then go onto find the cache, all that seems to be possible is to change the selected radio button and enter more text. Having seperate field notes would allow for that information to be kept seperate. Or maybe if selecting the radio button put a tag in the body, that would work too. Do you care to elaborate on those niggles & the potential showstopper? Don't you think you should try to understand the software better and find at least one cache with it before criticizing? I used the software last week to do the first parts of a multi, Friday to tackle some caches in Central London, on Sunday to do four caches and one on Monday. I'm comparing my experience against that of using Cachemate to do 25 the Sunday before. (So to head off any further questions, I log under SmudgyPixels, with my wife, and the marathon caching session isn't logged yet as I'm still writing up the experienceand I'm trying to avoid TNLNSL, TFTC entries). The potential showstopper is the Today/minimising issue when running on PPC 2002. I use both a bluetooth GPSr (in the car) and a handheld. The Today screen is the easiest way to turn off the bluetooth radio. Having to quit the program to access the Today screen and then reload the relevent file can get a bit wearing on a long day. In light of this, one niggle is that the program doesn't remember the last file it had open and re-open it on restart. I appreciate to some this would be a pain but it's one less step when you are having to reload the program on a regular basis. My comments above about file notes also count as a niggle, though I accept that I may be misunderstanding them. One extra feature there that would be nice would be the ability to quickly add a time and datestamp. The tap and hold access to the menus seems counterintuative to me, personally I would prefer standard menus across the bottom of the screen. It's survivable however and hence just a niggle. So as you don't think I'm just a whinging Brit (though you may already think that), I'd like to end on some positive notes: TB Handling. Once I worked out how this worked, it's a really great feature. A way to enter manual text in the grabbed box would be useful, for those times when your GPX file isn't bang up to date and what's in the cache isn't listed, but entering the details by hand in the note isn't a problem. Centering on a cache: Like this. Works great for working out which cache to move on to next. And it's quick which is superb. The pop-up hints box is a really nice touch (I'm not too proud to use a hint if I've been searching for ages or am likely to attract too much attention if I hang around too much). Of the tools I've looked at on the PPC (GPXView and Spinner being the others), GPXSonar is definitely the best of the bunch in my view. Thank you for putting the time and effort into writing it. Having been a software developer many moons ago, I do appreciate how much work you've put in. - Neil. (For the curious: Why have I moved away from Cachemate and the Palm? Simple answer is maps! The Memory Map OS maps and Street Atlases work well and are easy to use. They meet my needs perfectly and I didn't want to be carrying two pdas all the time (tried that when I was using the bluetooth gpsr in the field with GPSTuner on the iPaq to find caches and Cachemate to look at the descriptions, etc. It's why I now use a Geko 201 away from the car :-) ), and as I already had the 3870 it made logical sense to use that for everything geocaching related.)

For who? GPXSonar doesn't need evaluated. For me. If I'm going to use a piece of software in anger, then I like to make sure it's up to the job first. A few niggles aside, and a potential showstopper that I'm prepared to live with, it does seem to be a good piece of software. - Neil.

Thanks for that. I'm slowly getting to grips with the software and can see it's potential. It would be cool if you could have multiple notes against a cache, so you could log a DNF and maybe a Found later, but that may well come with time. For now, I'm off to get better acquainted with GPXSonar. - Neil.

Thanks to everyone for all their suggestions. As it happens I found a suitable solution in one of the cell phone retailers here in the UK, one of their own universal cell phone holders. It's spring loaded just like some of the universal pda mounts you can get and as you can see it works a treat with the Geko. It has a small lip on the bottom to stop it's contents from slipping out and it's still possible to get to the data port on the top. So I am one happy bunny :-) - Neil.

I've just checked this series of caches out..... WOW! So can anyone recommend a good B&B or motel in the area? :-) - Neil.