cr4zybilly

Yeah--serious bummer. I blew all my cash on the nicest unit I could afford and now they want me to spend more money to make it usable b/c their data formats are less than free ("free" as in speech), and all their software is utterly proprietary, they force me to use Windows to connect to the unit (little to no Linux support), etc. It's a nice unit and does paperless great, but this sentiment that "you've already spent a big chunk of change on the unit, just pay a little more and it'll actually work the way we're pitching it" is ridiculous. I simply don't have the cash in my budget right now to even re-up my geocaching.com membership which ran out today (which isn't to say that I don't have cash, just that I've got my priorities straight and know how a budget works), let alone lay out MORE cash for maps, etc. So yeah, it's a bummer that there's tons of free resources out there for Garmin users but Delorme's policy of restricting their users by refusing to play nice with more interoperable, free and open formats could only be described as a "serious bummer" or perhaps "reason to consider a different company".

Ugh. That's a pretty serious bummer. I should have got a Garmin.

Is there something out there like gpsfiledepot.com for delorme units (or can I get the garmin-formatted maps from there to work on my PN-30)? I know I can spend $40 on an all-you-can-eat plan w/ delorme, but things are tight right now and I've got to re-up my premium membership here before I get new/better maps. Any suggestions/recommendations?

Ah...so what they're saying is "You've still got to use GSAK or CacheRegister or whatever to load it up--we didn't add the Complete Magic Feature yet." Good to know. I was afraid it was something more like "we took a couple features out--it's pretty much hosed for geocaching now". Sounds like I'm good to go--I'll be doing that update tonight!

Well, there's this post on the Delorme blog that says It's the "we did not deliver support for geocaching.com GPS attributes" part that worries me. Then again, I have no idea what that actually means

I've been reading up on the 2.7 firmware for my PN-30, thinking about the upgrade. I'm a bit confused, though--there's some vague talk about it introducing some limitations for geocaching. Has anybody experienced that? (FWIW, I use GSAK to load things)

Ah ha! This is just what I was looking for! I was starting to get annoyed with spending so much on my PN-30 if I was going to have to load it ALL the time. But this is perfect!

I'm curious how you set your PQs up on the site--just to grab everything? or do you chop them up so you have a bunch of individual PQs for each sliver of whatever it is you're looking for?

I can do either of those. The problem comes when I want to do something that neither--something specific a little ways away that I may or may not remember the name of. In case, I'm mostly just curious how everybody's using their PQs--with mass exporting or with some sense of segmentation?

I've been using my new PN-30 for about a week now. I've got to say, going paperless is AWESOME. One of the first things I did, though, was to dump out a PQ will all the caches around my home location. So now, I've got a million billion caches in there. when I want to find just one, like if I think, 'Oh, I'd like to go to Such-and-Such a cache as Whats-It-Called Park', I've got to sort through all the caches I've got in there to find Such-and-Such. Seems like it might make more sense to keep fewer caches in the GPSr at a time, and segment them somehow, so they're easier to sort through. Is anybody doing anything like that? or do you just fill up your unit with all the caches you might ever think of looking for, close to where you're going to be?

I gave the field notes thing a go last night--that worked pretty good, almost exactly what I wanted to do. Bizarrely, though on Linux, I couldn't see FieldNotes.txt (even though I could see my maps and the maps folder). No idea what was up with that. But that's a topic for another thread

Right on. I'll give that a go. Thanks!

Hrmph--I'm kind of trying to avoid spending anymore cash at this point. I already overspent on the PN-30

My new PN-30 showed up at the beginning of this weekend, so I put it and the nice weather to good use. I've got to say, being able to see the whole cache description, size, difficult, everything was AWESOME! I also thought it was wicked cool to be able to log the caches in the field. Now that the weekend's over, I thought I'd get them all logged. Is there an easy way to log them semi-automatically with GSAK? I'd like to hand-edit my logs (I threw in some "TFTC"s with the PN-30's short codes, but I'd like to do more than that. But I was hoping there was a quick/easy way to edit that stuff then register all the logs. Maybe I'm just not seeing it? Thanks!

Bahahahah! That's awesome.

i just got a Delorme PN-30 for $160 on ebay. I had to wait about a month to get one for that price (I bid on every one that came up, but didn't win for a long while). Figure out your budget and stick with it. Watch ebay and craigslist and somehing will come up eventually.... Also, keep an eye on the 'for sale' section of the forums.

Perfect--I'll give it a go. Thanks!

The other day a geocaching buddy of mine dropped by the house. He's recently got a new job that he loves but is sucking up his time and ended up leaving a trackable (TB? geocoin? I don't remember--it's in the geobag ) at my house--he knew he wasn't going to have time to get it out somewhere I forgot to make him take it back before he left. Is there a good way to transfer the TB from him to me without us having to log a cache?

FYI, something else that doesn't work is those little trapezoidal plastic containers that pencil lead comes in. Early last winter I filled up my mechanical pencil at work and said to myself, "hmmm...micro?" So I stuck a piece of paper in it and dropped in a cup of water for a week. Only the tiniest bit of dampness. Then I stuck it outside, where it got snowed on, for two weeks. I won't say the paper was soaked, but if it had been a real cache, I would have marked it as 'needs maintenance'. Not a good container.

My first geocaching experience was similar--I took my wife and son out to the park and we walked all around looking for what I told them was probably "a box or bin about a foot square or so on the ground." Turns out, one of the caches we were looking for was a micro hidden just above eye level in a knot of a tree and the other was on top a 10' stick deviously camouflaged in a tree. Both cool hides and once I found them, I was hooked! But I had to go back at least twice to find them! Keep hunting--you'll get 'em!

I've been using my car GPS, too--I get size, name and location. I enjoy getting to the place, but I've found I really enjoy the rush of finding the cache, seeing the hide and spotting it (caching with a group and being the first to spot a tricky hide is quite possibly my favorite). Since I have to load caches by hand, usually, I'll try keep an eye on the difficulty. If it's 2.5 or more, I'll read the description. Unless I know I'll be going without my GPS in hand (grabbed one just down the road from the office today at lunch that way), I NEVER do more than skim the logs to make sure it's there (and usually not even that)--it's too easy to get a spoiler in the logs. I also only rarely use Bing maps, again, only if it's a tough cache or I know I'm going in 'blind'. If I DNF on it, though, then every thing's free game: hints, maps, logs, anything and everything I can do to find the dumb thing. I hate fumbling around when there's a lot of people around. But really searching...that's half the fun!

I'd be willing to guess that over the next 2 years, the overwhelming number of casual geocachers drift towards the iPhone and Android devices, just b/c it's a device they want to own anyway. If you've already got the thing in your pocket and it gets you within 30' of the cache, that's usually enough to get your geosenses going--that extra 20' may be worth spending a hundred bucks or so to fix, but it isn't worth carrying around another device all the time. Serious cachers (and people who aren't willing to drink the big cell company koolaid) will continue to buy and use dedicated units.

What's waypoint projection?

Gotcha--that's kind of what I was expecting (and honestly, what I was hoping for). But the geek in me is always looking for ways to hack into something cool (and to redeem old technology )

I just picked up a PN-30 from ebay...I'm eagerly waiting for it to show up so I can jump into going fully paperless. In the past, I've just entered the caches manually as points-of-interest in my Mio GPSr (very much a car unit) and made do with the name and an icon indicating size. I was at an event last weekend and saw a guy set his 60CSx down to jot something in his PDA, but didn't get a chance to ask him about it. But it got me wondering... I've got an old Palm in my junk drawer--once I get the PN-30 in service, is there any reason to dust off the Palm? Anything it would add in the field?