geo-merge

I had a similar problem with my Tacoma and a garmin 60CS. Using the beanbag mount with the 60CS put the center of gravity far enough forward that the whole thing would slide off if I hit a big bump, or just thru road vibration. My solution was to take a small pice of velcro and fasten the part of the mount closest to the windshield to the dashboard. This worked out really well for me. Everything stayed where it should have even off road. Hope this helps. geo-merge

I picked up a streetpilot c340 on Black Friday, and have used it for navigation ever since. It came with city navigator 8, and I am able to connect with my current city select 7 s/w to transfer all my saved waypoints (frieds, hotels etc) without any problems. It has verbal firections, true text speech, and a nice clear touchscreen. No MP3 player or blue tooth or datebook, but them that's why I have a T/X and Ipod. I like it alot as it is. I would suggest going to the garmin website and browsing to see what is available for automotive gps. I hope this helped.

Ditto here for the Gilssons. I have one for my 60CS, which since it is a passive antenna, also works for my C340. Accuracy is usually +/- 6 feet on the highway. Never used it in the woods though.

I have for sale a garmin GPS V with bean bag auto mount, serial PC cable and auto 12V adapter and manual on CD. It is used, but in excellent like new condition. I have upgraded twice, and no longer have a use for this one (also have a GPSMAP 60CS and C340). I am asking $150.00 for everything. This unit is no longer manufactured by Garmin, but is still supported. It has 19MB onboard memory, monochrome screen, and is autoroutable. Please look it up on the Garmin website for all the rest of the technical specs. I have it loaded with City Select maps for my area, but will load on maps for any area you want. Unfortunately, when I put it on ebay, I got spammed by people thru the contact the seller link. I tried to sell it in my local paper, but everyone wanted the kind that talks, or for their truck drivinging friend. I had to explain that this unit is not big enough to go cross country with, but is great for those day trips or weekenders. We used it to get to MA, then loaded on maps for the local area, and it worked great. If you are interested in this unit, please contact me. I can provide you with pictures, and my ebay ID so you can check my feedback (100%). Thanks for taking the time to read this.

My 60 CS works great for that. When you select the map sections in Mapsource, make sure the little box at the bottom left is checked so that when you upload the maps, it includes all the info for autorouting..

I had a similar problem with my GPS V and a HP laptop that didn't have a serial port. I used a serial/USB cable and thhat thing was a pain. I ended up going into control panel, system, hardware, device manager, ports, comm ports, advanced, and finding an unused com port and assigning it to my GPS V. If you have a Palm or anything like that, make sure to disable the HOTSYNC since this seizes a comm port at startup. It made me really nervous to go this deep into the setup, but it finally worked. I would also think that installing a serial card in an empty slot would be easier. My current laptop doesn't have a serial port, but it plugs into a docking station that does. I can work w/ the GPS V easily now once I remember to disable HOTSYNC. Good luck

I've been doing some reading in the "I lost my gps" threads, and it seems to be a universal opinion that the Garmin bike mount doesn't always keep the gpsr in the bracket. I've thinking about getting one, and some of the ideas presented look like they would work. Maybe a couple of heavy duty rubber bands, or some type of elastic would help keep it on. I have some of the velcro cable ties that I think would work, and might last longer than a rubber band. You can get them at almost any electronics store or your local Lowes or Home Depot. I use them to keep all the cables for my laptop neat, especially when traveling. I haven't tried it yet, but who knows, it might work. Just have to figure out where to position them so the display screen is still visable. On the other hand, I have read that the ram mounts are supposed to be really sturdy. I'll have to check into them also.

testing

I've got the 60cs also. I bought the suction mount first, and due to the 60cs being a vertical unit, it doesn't fit real well in my truck. They are building dashboards a lot higher these days. The only way I could get it positioned at an angle so I could see it was to rotate the main part slightly so that it wasn't stcking straight out, and then rotate the clip that the 60cs fits in. But to answer your original question, I was unable to figure out any way to get the suction mount to fit into the dashmount or the bean bag. I think you are going to have to break down and purchase the dash mount separately like I did. One thing I noticed with the 60cs as opposed to the gpsV is that with the bean bag mount one should position it as close to the dash as possible, keeping the center of gravity low. I has the whole thing bounce off a couple of times since I has to move the 60cs about 4" from the center of the bean bag so it would fit between the dash and the windshield. This resulted in a configuration that would bounce and move around during travel over NY's roads. I ended up putting a beanie baby between the bean bag and the bottom of my radar detector to keep it in place. I did say beanie baby. Since we now have 4 lizards as pets, I thought one would be appropriate as a mascot in my truck. Just a thought; If the suction cup won't hold in the Texas sun, I would use caution with the dash mount. It holds using some kind of adhesive disk. Would the sun and heat have an affect on tha adhesive's holding abilities? Hope this helps.

I think, except for the new palmone Lifedrive ($500.00), the only way to get wi-fi on a palm is to in the sd slot. The last time I priced these they were over $100. I have used a palm Tungston T3, an old handspring visor (2MB) and bought a m105 with cradle off of ebay and all three have been able to store at least 250+ caches using cachemate. If all you are looking for is a pda for cacheing, buy a cheap one with 8MB off of ebay. I think of my visor and M105 as disposable since they were both $20.00, and if they fall and get damaged, wet etc. it's no big loss.

My vote is for City Select. We used it on vacation in MA last year and went thru Boston, NH and ME without using any paper maps . It's great for when you're heading back to the hotel and get hungry. Just do a find for the nearest restaurant and it goes to work. Found some great places to eat that way. We also used the autorouting feature for spur of the moment side trips. We are going to Toronto this year, and stopping in Buffalo / Niagara falls on the way back. I have found it useful to find and save our destinations (hotels, attractions, etc.) ahead of time in City Select, then upload to my 60cs. That way, I can get a route from wherever we happen to be, with out having to "plan" the route ahead of time. Just a hint, if you have a lot of caches loaded into your gps, they will show up as waypoints when you route on your gps. I ran a pocket query of 250 or so, and loaded them into my gps. I tried to route to a waypoint later and ended up doing a lot of scrolling. I ended up deleteing the waypoints out of the gps, and reloading my saved ones from Mapsource. It also works the other way, if you're out and about and find someplace you want to waypoint, and decide to download to city select, all the caches come with it, so your waypoint list gets really long. I emailed Garmin to see if there was a way to selectively download waypoints from the gps but support said no there wasn't. They also said they would pass it on to whoever does the mapsource updates, so maybe I'll see it in the future. Good luck on whichever choice you make. It took me awhile to get the hang of using Mapsource, but I'm the type who still likes paper manuals and won't go to the help button until I'm ready to tear my hair out.

Hi. I just got a 60cs also, and had to find help here to use my geocaching mode, so you are not alone. If you do have CitySelect software, which allows you to send maps to the gpsr, there is a small box in Mapsource that must be checked. Once you have selected the map sections you want to load, at the bottom of the list of maps is a option that says Include route calculation data. This box should be checked. There is also a dropdown menu at the top (middle) that lists which map sets you have available. My 60cs came with trip and waypoint manager, which I believe does not support auto routing. If that is the only map that shows when you click on the dropdown menu, I think you are not going to be able to have auto routing capabilities on your unit. I had already installed City Select V5 from my previous gps, so I'm not really sure what the mapsource s/w supplied with the unit is capable of, as I never used it.. Based on your post, I would guess that you only have the mapsource software that came with the unit, and that probably doesn't support autorouting. Good luck and happy hunting

I just purchased cachemate, and started using it on my Palm T3. Since this is quite expensive, and I can be fumble fingered, I picked up a used Handspring Visor at a flea market. If you go to the support page for cachemate, there is a link where you can request another registration code due to a mis-typed username or a changed user name. I did this so I could run it on the Visor, and leave the T3 safe and dry. I just installed the software for cachemate to the visor, and set it up as a different username. Since I don't plan on using the visor for anything other than cacheing, this works well for me. I am not sure what the software license reads, but I would think that the author intends it to be used on only 1 unit. As suggested in a previous post, you might want to inquire at smittyware.com if you want to use both units.

Started out with a Magellan Meridian gold, and being ignorant (and no serial port on my laptop) entered the numbers by hand. Pros being it has a slot for a SD card, and was a nice size for my hand, and a lot of screens for seeing where you were going.. Cons, no autorouting. Next was (is) a GPS V. Awesome unit, just a bit small in the memory department and it communicates via serial cable. Also a bit slow in the recalulating when using autorouting. Now, I am using a GPSMAP 60CS. I love this unit. Great color, fast processor and it can load data using either serial or USB. I just loaded 50 MB worth of maps from city select (with autorouting data) in 4 minutes, not counting the index stuff. I use this for caching as well as kayaking and getting from here to there.

Thank you so much for the help. It works now!! The faq on the 60 cs is also a very good reference, and I'm sure I'll be going there a lot.

I'm new to this so please be patient. I just purchased a 60cs, and downloaded Easy GPS & GSAK so I could load caches to the GPSr. I followed the instructions in the garmin manual, find, geocache, goto and the route calculated. But when I go to the compass page, it is the regular screen, not the geocache navigation screen. When I press find, geocache, a list comes up with the ones I loaded from GSAK, so I figured I uploaded correctly. I've tried deleting all the caches, and reloading but nothing seems to work. The routes go to the correct locations where the caches are, but I can't log them as "found", which is frustrating to say the least. I'm probably overlooking something really simple, but after researching the forums and the garmin site, I'm stiill unable to solve the problem. Any help would be appreciated.