Sue and Bernie

...and has a Travel Bug tag on his GOLF balls!!

Should be good for us - big memories for Sue and I, No 1 son Adam was born at the old RAF Hospital at Ely many moons ago.

Do not concern yourself overly about the basemap if you go for a mapping unit - you'll never use it intentionally! When you load your eTrex with map data, it overwrites the very rudimentary basemap. My Vista C with 24 MB of memory will hold Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, a chunk of Kent - and this is using City Navigator data that includes autorouting information. That's a fair bit of cycling! Using Garmin's Mapsource data, (which excludes the autorouting info) you can load a far greater area. If you are desperate to have basemap data installed you can obtain Garmin's World Map cheap - this has the whole world at pish resolution.

You'll need a very long cable to enable you to use Memory-Map in the field!

GSAK Cachemate ...and Premium Membership to access Pocket Queries

...and a couple more times after pressing the button! Why can't you see the so-obvious errors before posting (or printing). ...and again after editing! Doh!

Can't we just point Mr Plod in the direction of the current seller to reclaim the stolen property? I understood that even if the kit is stolen from the owner, they still own it therefore it cannot be sold or bought by other parties.

That's the way we started - and continue still. It's always been the trip, walk and being out in the countryside for us, preferably by bike. We've taken particular pleasure in introducing our friends and family to the great outdoors in their own neighbourhoods and local areas. It's a nice to witness their suprise too at the nearby treasures and beauty spots of which they had been totally oblivious, just like we were too before geo-geeking.

Mapsource discs are not "locked" - Garmin only lock their software that contains auto-routing data (though I believe the early versions of Mapsource USA, V4 and lower, did have the autorouting data and were not locked). Garmin's City Select and City Navigator software is locked via the 25 digit code provided and the serial number of the GPS unit. Each piece of software can be unlocked to two different GPS units - once unlocked in this way, the software will only every work with the selected units. I use CN software with my Streetpilot 2610 and a Vista C in this way. Hence I do not understand why you are experiencing difficulties loading Mapsource data maps into your Legend C. This situation does not compute! The maps should install into both your units with ease (and any other Garmin units you care to connect - that will accept map data of course). You are correct in that there is a key combination to reset the Legend C. A quick google found this: Aspid Shop... ...hope it helps you out.

Save 'em for better weather, get a holder for your GPS then start cycling... ...and when you clear out those in straight cycling distance, start dumping the car in handy supermarket carparks to extend your range.

Sue & I got into GPS through our enjoyment of long bike rides through the wilds of East Anglia (good weather only of course). Once off the main roads, the back roads and the countryside are superb. We found a problem in that the constant halts to consult maps were spoiling our rides a bit, it slowed us down somewhat and we did not fancy the "take-your-eyes-off-the -road-and-look-at-a-map-strapped-to-the-handlebars" approach. Some-one joking suggested a GPS for our bikes, we investigated and now we regularly use geo-caching to provide the destinations for our bike rides. As we clear out the caches from our local area, we start dumping the car at a convenient superstore some way from the house and cycle onwards to more distant caches...

I got them too - just sent them all bills and am waiting for the money to pour in! (Joking - but Alex had better sort his email life out before some "wag" does mess with the private information he has somehow inadvertantly let out into the wild). In the meantime, I would suggest that no-one sends an email to gccoins unless you want your details broadcast in a similar fashion. No doubt Alex will be panicing to sort this out sharpest...

...but it's a good idea to keep a foot in both camps and get the best of both worlds. We have a Garmin Streetpilot 2610 and a Vista C sharing City Navigator software. These were the mainstay of our GPS and geo-geeking activities. Recently, we moved into the Pocket PC world - for me, an attempt to reduce/combine the growing amount of kit I was want to carry about with me. This wrapped up the phone/PDA side of things in one go. Now, after getting a BT GPS and TomTom, the PPC beginning to displace the SP 2610 as well (safety cameras database with automatically downloaded updates each day). Besides, when I go away, Sue likes to have the SP to hand. Being able to use Memory-Map in the field is excellent too, definately icing on the cake. ...if I could just get the Ipaq to do the spectacles bit as well cos I kept leaving them behind!!!

It has now been incorporated into "Mobility Today" here: Dave's Ipaq... I beg assistance and make a few wee contributions as "Bernie K". I've managed to drop my a few times too - but it feels like I'm playing russian roulette with it, the heart certainly falters until the screen comes up....Phew! Mind you, when geocaching, it's in a metal case and only comes out when I'm sitting down in the dry. ...and the Ipaq has been behaving properly for the last 2 months. Plenty of soft resets because it's gone on strike but that's normal. It still works nomally! Mine you, I have not had the audacity to ask for it's permission to be allowed to play with any new bluetooth toys since the last hard reset. No doubt if I dare to - it will sulk again!

I think that "WizBar Advance 2" has the facility to do this. I used it for a trial but did not continue with it...

Firefox is a doddle to install. The other bits aren't too bad either. A bit of button pressing and it all worked. IE was still there in splendid isolation to go back to if it went pear-shaped. The end result is pretty impressive. I went for FF originally for the automatic import of the OS maps instead of the grey pin map on the cache pages. Next was Lordelphs bit for pulling in a 1:25K OS map from making the co-ordinates into a hotlink. ...and lastly, the blue cross thing is an absolute cracking solution to the "Congrats War" that leaves everyone with the view of the forums that they wanted. You'll find the other good bits of FF once you've started using it...

I don't agree about any of those (having dropped mine a few times and having just had 9 hours of constant (Memory Map) use out of a battery with no resets required). Wow! NINE hours! I am impressed with your model with a battery can power the large backlit screen and all that graphic processing for a period like that. By contrast, both our Ipaqs will lose about 40% of battery power over 24 hrs with modest use (also as a phone). To judge from the comments on "Dave's Ipaq" forum this is not unusual. Compared to the phones we used previously (7 days between charges) and the Palm IIIxe (6 weeks on 2x AAA batteries), the Ipaq is a real lightweight. To support the power hungry beasts we have bought 4 cradles and power adaptors, one each at home and one each at work. We also have a spare battery constantly on charge and a battery extender pack with 4x AA inside for being caught short. We also various travel packs and cables to hook the blighters up to any available source. My Ipaq is paired to 5 Bluetooth devices (keyboard, 2 earpieces, 2 GPS units). Over the past few months, I have had several very long hair-pulling-out sessions when one or another of the BT devices has unilaterally decided to no longer connect. A hard reset and software rebuild from scratch was the final solution after lots of forum-ing to find an easy fix. Some-one has now posted a fix on Dave's Ipaq - and surprise, surprise, my Ipaq has been as good as gold since. What was really galling was that backups (using Sprite and ActiveSync) from a known "good" time did not restore the situation! This did not compare well with the Palm's faultless recoveries. Nah! I would still warn people that they are finicky, power-hungry and delicate - but with TomTom, Memory-Map, GPS Sonar (and loads of other programmes), the Ipaq, like its PC big brother, won me over by the sheer wealth of software and capabilities.

As Lacto has pointed out already, the Firefox browser with GreaseMonkey and Lordelph & Co's excellent scripts have resolved this issue for all parties (as well as pulling in better OS maps into cache pages). The little blue "x" can make the object of your ire disappear into the void for whatever the subject that grabs your goat. Don't get CROSS - get a "cross"!

I've used both. The easiest PDA to use is the Palm - they've just got it right! Everything is just as you would want it to be. Where there are shortfalls, some-one has devised a solution to make the Palm even easier to use. However, the most useful is the Pocket PC! Outlook is so good, so complex if you want to delve into it, that it can do anything. Combine this with the other facilities you can incorporate into it, it becomes the solution of choice. I started with a Palm IIIxe and ended up with a PPC. I have just bought another Ipaq 6340 (second-hand, eBay) for £202 for Sue. This incorporates a phone, bluetooth etc etc. I had accumulated two car holders, two bluetooth GPS units (the first died, bought another, company eventually repaired the first free of charge) and 2 BT earpieces. The Ipaqs are finicky, eat their batteries and are fragile - but they are miniture PCs and, when they are good, they are very, very good. ...and one tip, if you type, invest in a keyboard for your PDA. It makes it so much more useable all round. B

Loads around there - both our offspring live down there, Adam just over the heath, down the road from the Observatory and Louise at Lewisham not far away. We often stroll over there on nice days, picking up the odd cache. Take a bag of shelled peanuts for the squirrels who will take them from your hand...

We would attend - it would give us a reason to visit the area. We regularly just storm past on the M11/A11 from Norwich to the Smoke and further south, headed for family and friends.

We had one mady up based on this A3 caricature from a few years back: ...I photographed it, reduced it and has a stamp made up from it. We too use it to mark logbooks.

I have added all my family and other regular haunts as separate "locations". I then use these as the centre point for filters. When we go visiting, I use the appropriate saved filter to pull out the required set of caches to pump the whole lot into our Ipaq for GPS Sonar, the Garmin for actually searching and finally to MemoryMap to display the caches. Obviously, you can do this as frequently as you want to.

I'll second that on both counts! I've got all the same scripts running on the updated Firefox.

It's been a while since I owned a "yellow". For my answer, I did assume that it still connected to a pc via a serial lead with a flat, 4 contacts-in-a-row connector that was the standard fitting on the older eTrex models. If this is the case with your - you do need a serial lead. If you do not have a serial port on your pc, you will also need a USB/Serial convertor (as I did to connect my old B&W Vista to my laptop). If you have a mini-USB socket on your eTrex (like my current eTrex Vista C), you can indeed use USB to connect the two. The Webupdate software makes upgrading easy - once you have the two connected!