Sue and Bernie

Sue & I don't mind - we'll use the bikes anyway! Variety is the key. We always enjoy a quickie (cache) but thoroughly relish the more distant ones that require a good 50 mile round cycle to gather. We do not enjoy urban caches where you have to dash in and stand around conspicuously out of place, pretending to be incontinent again!

There are a number of recent threads on this subject - just look back in the forums. PDA's, either Pocket PCs and GPSonar or Palms and Cachemate, are the paperless solutions of preference. Both packages can be fed from the combination of GSAK and Pocket Queries. With this hardware and software combos, you can forget paper printouts of the caches and ensure that you leave home with the latest status of the caches out there.

Been out cycling with Sue and the new Vista C today - it arrived just in time to join us this morning. Loaded with data from City Navigator, it performed as a mini-StreetPilot 3! Obviously it does not do the talking thing but it does sound a chime when it needs you to pay attention! Driving back from Thetford (where we parked the car up), I had both the Vista C and the StreetPilot routing us home. We deliberately went off-route and found that the Vista C wiped the floor with the SP3, it re-calculated the route in a third of the time the old SP3 took. The Vista worked for 6 hours, virtually continuously, on 2 NiMH batteries. We were both impressed with the new kit... ...so if you have either of Garmin's top-end software programmes, either City Navigator or City Select with an unlock available, the Vista C is an excellent choice.

I was invoiced a total of €395.46 - should come out to about £265. When it appears on my Visa bill online, I will post it here. The link to the company is: Aspid Communications - some company in Portugal Note that I have nothing to do with them, I am just letting the geo-geeking community into something I am pleased with. Enjoy!...

...Oh! another thing... The company I bought from - Aspid Comms in Portugal - delivered at 8 am this morning via Fedex. I ordered it at 3.30 pm Fri! Cost £8 delivery but arrived in 2 1/2 days over the weekend. I bought from this company because it was the cheapest price I found. The speed of delivery was pretty impressive too...

Vista C has arrived. It's brilliant but... ...see the topic I started for details.

...are very good! especially if you already own Garmin's City Navigator or City Select. Software: I tried installing maps from an old copy of Metroguide Europe. The maps load normally as per the Vista with the same coverage and detail. The "transfer routing data" option was grey-ed out. I flicked over to CN Europe V6 (we also own a Streetpilot 3). The option was enabled now but the software was not unlocked for the new Vista C. I switched back to MG Europe, the option previously unavailable was now ticked! Tried to transfer the maps but the software and unit both reported the selected maps were locked. I went online and registered my new unit against CN 6. Garmin allow you to use CN and CS software with 2 different units. This was successful, the maps were available and the Vista C now maps and auto-routes just like the SP3. Obviously, the area covered, in the 24 megs of the Vista, is far smaller. For our cycling, this really is not a problem. The colour screens and menu are bright and clear. I have not had time to play with all the new functions on board. Physical: The unit is wider but shorter than the "normal" Vista. It does fit into Garmin's streachy Vista carrying case. The cable connection has changed from serial to USB. Data loading is so much faster it is untrue. Unfortunately, old style external power supply units, essential for running the backlighting in the car, cannot be connected. The unit has sound! Just! It really helps to draw your attention when something is about to happen. The unit came with a data cable and an adaptor for the existing Vista bike mount. (I will be selling 2x "old" Vista bike mounting backplates now rendered redundant along with 3x external power supplies). Summary: Vista C is a great new unit - if you already own some of Garmin's expensive auto-routing software. If you do not, you have a very expensive outlay ahead to enable you to fully exploit the functions of this new unit.

...it looks safe as houses to me! I am still getting a blank page with "Done..." at the bottom of the browser after I logon to the site. At this rate, there won't be much traffic from me. Gmail has got me "beta-ned"...

...but unfortunately we're forked! We are already committed with Memory-Map on one hand and Palm stuff on the other. Sometime in the future, when I get a trip to the States, we will probably go Pocket PC just to be able to use MM. The Palm IIIxe option is dirt-cheap via eBay (though I think that other Geo-geeks have been snapping them up) even when couple with the two essential shareware packages GSAK and Cachemate. I snagged my last Palm from Germany via eBay. It came with a leather case, a spare serial lead and all the bits for a whole €17 - £11.

Rutson, ...got the email and did the registration thing okay, thank you. However, it does not appear to be working properly. When I logon successfully to the web page, after watching "Loading..." for a while, the page goes blank and "Done" appears down the bottom. I get bored after a bit and go back to the Groundspeak forums. I have determined that this is not what should happen! Any pointers as to what is not happening or what I have done wrong? Bernie

....just weakened and ordered a Vista colour - good offer from: Aspid... some company in Portugal!!! ...I fancied a 60CS but I would have had to buy City Select - having to keep City Navigator up to date is expensive enough thank you! I hope the MG Europe I have will autoroute with the new Vista....

I got myself a Palm IIIxe simply for running Cachemate so that I could join the paperless caching crowd. A recent exped to N Yorkshire with a mound of printouts (my first mass pre-prep of a whole 15 caches) resulted in a vehicle full of sheets of A4 all over the place. Now the Palm is full of other stuff - all the birthdays, reminders, to-dos (get Re-do to post recurrent To-do like MOTs etc) and all sort of other diversions. I ended up getting one for Sue and daughter Louise (another gadget fiend) and we are ditching our old Sharp organisers that have served us so well. Caching!? I simply wouldn't leave home without it. Whenever I am called to some obscure part of the UK or the world, I punch in a quick pocket query and dump the wad of caches into the palm. Super! ...I'd love a colour one - but the Palms don't do Memory-Map!!!! Drat!!!

We did our first recently - we used our mobile to get the father-in-law to save the picture and then email it to us for posting on the site. This is the simplest low-tech solution!

If there are any left - we'll have one....

I read this thread with a wry smile throughout. All this reliance on hardware! I am a Brit and in the normal course of events, have very little contact with the wide open areas of the world and adverse climes. However, I have learned to read the night sky and the sun movements so that I work out which way to go. Yes! I do all the techie stuff and I can do the map and compass thing but I can always fall back on the mark 1 eye and brain. These easily learned skills enable me to amaze the wife by heading off boldly in the right direction when we are out in the wilds of Norfolk (the original). With a quick look at the sky, night or day, I know which way to head. I only mention this because I didn't see anyone else do so... ...mind you, I'd be stuffed in the southern hemisphere!

I too have found a problem with displaying cache page photos with IE6. I can see the thumbnails at each cache page and in the gallery but the full-size pictures will not display! However, if I use my "Auction Tamer" browser (one that is specialised for eBay and other auction sites) at GC.com, everything is okay. Obviously, I have frigged IE6 somewhere but after many attempts, I cannot work out what has to be done to persuade it to display my GC.com pages normally. Anyone else had this?

Sue & I bought a Garmin eTrex (yellow job) for use on our longer bike rides. If you have every cycled round the country lanes of Norfolk, you will know that you can quickly find yourself charging down the wrong route. We found that our progress was constantly hampered by the need to consult the OS map - GPS seemed to be the answer... ...and that dragged us into geo-geeking. Now we have gone full circle - we use distant caches to provide the focus for our bike rides! Now we have a Vista on the bikes and a big Street Pilot 3 for the car. Both are loaded with loads of caches and we do not leave home without at least one of them.

The Palm IIIxe is fine! I got one for going paperless after following a load of other threads on the site. It holds the details of literally hundreds of caches and still has loads of room for a number of other programmes and diversions. As I get to travel about a bit with the job, I find it invaluable for caching. For example, I recently went to Cyprus for 2 weeks for a job and, the night before departing, I downloaded the pocket queries for Cyprus and the area around my airport for departure (just in case we got stuck there). This means you have the latest status of all the caches you may get the opportunity to hunt. When I think back to the wad of printouts I used to drag about... The best bit about the Palm is the way everything is backed up to the PC. I use the Palm to keep my laptop and PC in sync. I was also very impressed with the actual organiser functions of the old Palm, so much so that I bought another one for Sue (and yet another one for my daughter). All second-hand through eBay - the cheapes was €17 (£11) bought from Germany. With a quick bit of hot-syncing, all the family bumf was installed into the next 2 in minutes. I even picked up a really good keyboard for £1.99! The stuff may be "old" but it is still very functional. For caching, the Premium Membership is a must for the Pocket Queries, GSAK for processing and managing the waypoints (and exporting custom sets of waypoints to everything!) and of course, Cachemate to display and manage the caches in real-time. The latter 2 programmes are shareware and both are excellent examples of the gendre, brilliant software at token cost. In summary, the Palm IIIxe is ideal for caching. There are lots of colourful and faster alternatives but not at this price. If you lose/drop/sit on it, no sweat! - get another of the net...

Sue & I go along with the general trend - swap or don't, TB separate issue however, we do take issue with GeoVet's idea of having to place a cache as a condition of membership. While we applaud the thoughts behind the suggestion, it is based on the closed idea that everyone lives a static existance at a fixed location! For most people, this is obviously true... ....but not for us! I am in the military and we live a fairly nomadic lifestyle. While we could place caches and then continuously look for people to adopt 'em, we are actually waiting until we finally place roots (I retire in 2 years), before we start placing caches. I have already accumulated a dozen ammo boxes (perk of the trade) and have had them painted and marked up ready for the off. When the time comes, we will pay back the efforts of others. ....so, a little more lateral thinking before sallying forth chaps (and chapesses). Cheers!

...isn't that half the fun! Recently during a trip to Cyprus, my friend & I went for this cache: GCGZ4C Kalia We had only a poor photocopied road map provided with the borrowed car. We blindly followed the arrow on the GPS and ended up trekking a couple miles to the cache. We were scratched and bloodied on the journey down to the cache and again on the trip back... ... and found a car park about 1000m from the site that, using a dirt road from the opposite direction, would have made things far more easier. However, it was the most satisfying cache we chased that weekend. We did others in the same fashion - taking the most direct line - and ended up driving over mountains on dirt tracks and along riverbeds! Don't tell Craig who lent us the car! Steve, a geo-virgin, and I saw more of Cyprus in those 2 short days out in the sticks than in all our past trips - and a lot of that was down to not having a highly detailed road/contour map of the area.

Sue & I found we had lots of photo-quality, peel-off, self-adhesive labels left over from labelling CDs. They were too good to throw away - and then we though of using them for signature stamps to place in cache logbooks. Our stamps range from an inch square to the full 3"x2" label. The output, on the photo paper, is very good. We also use the same paper for making inserts for keyring fobs and fridge magnets. Being an artistically challenged engineer, we simply use a photograph of the caricature of us both from a couple of years back for the stamps, keyrings and of course, our avatar. While Sue reckons the artist got me down to a tee, she cannot see herself in her rendering!

Clyde, Prior to becoming a registered user of both GSAK, I used the search and download facilities of GCUK to produce .mxf (Navtech) files for displaying caches on Memory-Map. I now use your excellent programme to do this (along with stuffing the waypoints into my 2 Garmins and Palm via Cachemate). However, I note that the opposition have one trick up their sleeve that GSAK does not appear to have; GCUK downloads automatically displayed "found" caches as a dot and "not found" ones as a flag. All the waypoints I export into Memory-Map appear as flags. Currently, I do use the %found smart tag facility but the GCUK solution is far more elegant and user-friendly. While the smart tag is much more versatile, I do miss the calarity of simple dots and flags on the map. ...any chance of incorporating this into the GSAK .mxf export?

I have a Vista and the aforementions Palm/Cachemate/GSAK combo for paperless caching. I have only recently got into this far better way of managing caching and can heartily recommend the process to other geo-geeks. I have not got a cable to connect the GPS to the Palm - it costs more that the Palm and registering the shareware programmes did! The cheap and cheerful solution I use it to keep a log of the co-ordinates of frequently used starting points such as the home of family and friends, holiday hotel (or whatever) in a memo file. When required, I simply "cut 'n paste" the required co-ordinates into the "Nearest Caches" function in Cachemate - bingo! This search function "remembers" the last set of co-ordinates so they can easily be modified with a bit of stylus bashing in the field.

I recently got sucked into the paperless caching thing and bought an old b&w Palm IIIxe for the job. Brilliant solution.... ...and now it's got Backgammon, Chess and Scrabble on board too. Even in good old monochrome, they still while away the odd hour or two. Sue & I needed fresh batteries pretty quickly after playing Scrabble by beaming turns between our two Palms (yes, Sue wanted one of 'em too) during our flight back from holiday. I have not yet had the temerity to sit at my desk playing backgammon while pretending to be keying in important work-related stuff... ...but I might try this week!

You're totally correct Gerbil! - but it was through an informative posting like this thread that I had my eyes opened to the whole sphere of paperless caching. I am very grateful to the individual who put Sue and I on the right path - by sticking a hardware posting in amongst all the other more routine stuff. Viva la eccentric postings!!!