Munin

I haven't used the Garmin 60-series mount, but I've used Garmin's mounts for the Fortrex and 76-series on my mountain bike and was pleased with both. I remember with the Foretrex mount that I ended up grabbing a rubber shim from some other piece of gear to get a good tight fit on my handlebar, but that's obviously something that'll vary from one handlebar to the next. (In my case, the slim shim packaged with the mount was too thin, the fat one was too thick.) Since I'm not actually a particularly good mountain biker, I provide an excellent test environment for biking accessories. I've taken quite a few spills with both these mounts, and they've held onto the GPSrs. Worst I've had happen was a 76 sliding maybe 3/4" upwards after a rather grand tumble, and I doubt a 60-series GPSr would do even that much since it'd be held in place at the top by the belt clip button. During regular (i.e., right-side-up ) riding, I've yet to see my 76 shift around in the cradle, even over rocky/bumpy ground. Ditto for the mount itself - with the right shim/spacer in place, it's rock-solid on the handlebar and won't rotate/slip.

Empty nest? Cool - I think junior must be able to fly now!

Which way do you want to be challenged - by the hide, the terrain, or do you think you'll need high ratings in both categories to enjoy the hunt? I've beaten my brains against some puzzle caches for weeks (and months ), and find them rather satisfying even if the cache itself is a short hike and a simple hide. Same with terrain - I've done a couple of T4+ caches that ended with easy hides, but enjoyed the envigorating route to get to the cache. One thought that comes to mind is that if you're in Massachusetts, pop over to the New England regional section of the forums, tell folks what kinds of caches you're looking for, and ask for suggestions. (Maybe also give folks a rough idea of where you are and how far you're willing to drive.) Another thought is to consider getting a premium membership, even if it's only for a month. That'll give you access to the Pocket Query system, and one of the options in a PQ is to set a minium D/T rating for the caches included in the results. You'd be able to quickly build up a list of D4+/T4+ caches that way, then focus on the ones that seem most appealing to you. (I can tell you right now that there's only 10 caches rated 5/5 within 200 miles of Boston, but nearly 80 caches rated 4/4 or higher within the same radius - took me about 60 seconds to get that information with a pocket query. )

There is one cache in Papua New Guinea - GCRP8P - PNG's first Cache. Just in case you develop a severe case of cache withdrawal when you first get down there.

Yep!

The "Garmin adapter" is made by RAM - it's the RAM-HOL-GA11U Garmin Attachment Connector. It allows you to take the cradle from a Garmin-manufactured automobile navigation kit and connect it to RAM-manufactured components. Basically it's a little widget with a RAM diamond-plate on one end for connecting up to RAM gear, and a sort of U-shaped section at the other end that you can hook your Garmin cradle to: I recently posted a few pictures of a rig that included this adapter over in the Ram Mounts: How Do They Work? topic. (See post #18) I believe the cradle that Thrak had a bad experience with was the RAM RAM-HOL-GA14U Cradle, which looks like this: Unlike the Garmin version of the 76-series cradle, where the GPSr slides in from the top and held in place by gravity and friction, the RAM 76-series cradle has your spread apart the lower tabs and slide the GPSr in from the bottom, with the GPSr held in place on all sides. I haven't used the RAM cradle, so I can't speak to its ease of use or how it might chew up the rubber portions of the GPSr.

When you're running on batteries, there's a little icon in the status bar at the top of the display that shows an estimate of how much of a charge remains: It's the black bars that show the remaining charge, so in this example I've got roughly (very roughly) 75% remaining. It's not always a particularly linear rate of change - I've sometimes had the last bar hang in there for as long as the first three bars lasted - but it at least gives you an idea about whether your batteries are nearly full or approaching empty.

From what I've observed, the recent PQs are being arranged in order of increasing GC waypoint # (GC1111, GC1112, GC1113, etc) instead of distance from search origin.

It should be noted, however, that despite claims made in a recently-published study funded by KFC and Frito-Lay, neither fried chicken nor potato chips have been proven effective under laboratory conditions in preventing mosquito bites.

Yes, it's a global setting - if you set the Detail to "More" then you'll see your Custom POI icons whenever you're zoomed in to 500' or less, and the icons will go away whenever you're above the 500' zoom level. I haven't found a way to do this, but see 2b below for a partial solution. It's rather unintuitive, but if you disable the display of User Waypoints (go to Map display, hit Menu, Setup Map, scroll over to the Points/flag section, change User Waypoints to "OFF") then you'll gain two things - the name of the Custom POI will be displayed if you move the cursor over a Custom POI icon, and you'll be able to hit Enter and bring up the POI's information. Note however that when you disable User Waypoints, your regular waypoints will no longer show up on the map. (Regular waypoints will still show up if you do a Find->Waypoint though - so for multis you could still create regular waypoints for the 2nd/3rd/etc stages, then do a Find->Find to retrieve the waypoint and navigate to it.) Hopefully this will be improved in later "x" series firmware updates. GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) has a way to put the hint into the Notes field of a regular waypoint, or at least as much of a hint as can fit in the very limited space available for a Note. (See Question 11 in the GSAK FAQ.) Definitely more space available if take the Custom POI approach. There's no way to delete/alter a Custom POI "on the fly" - you need to recreate and redownload a new Custom POI database via the POILoader program. The approach I've been taking is to periodically generate a "My Finds" PQ and using it as one of my POI sources, and then have my other PQs only return caches that I haven't found yet (which get merged together via GPSBabel to form another POI source). If I want to revisit a cache I've already found, I can do a Find -> Custom POI -> Select Category -> My Finds. If I want to find a new cache, I'll do a Find -> Custom POI -> Select Category -> Unfound Caches. But like Hynr said, I need to use the ol' grey matter to keep track of caches I've found in between the times I update my PQs and redownload my Custom POI database. Again, there might be a way to simplify things a bit using a program like GSAK - perhaps mark the cache as found in GSAK, export a fresh Custom POI file containing just your unfound caches, and send that down to your GPSr with POILoader.

The base is a RAM RAP-279U Non-Skid Weighted Friction Base. As with most RAM bases, you can add on a whole variety of arms/cradles/etc to fit your specific device. A quick way to see a number of pre-packaged combos is to open up that page I linked to, go to the Search box at the top, and enter "rap279" - that'll bring up rigs for iPods, GPSrs, PDAs, etc.

Keep in mind that there's many different formulas of "plastic" - DEET reacts with some types, but by no means all of them. On one business trip I was running low on DEET, and picked up a spare 1-ounce bottle of 100% DEET at a store. Didn't end up needing it that trip, so I packed it away in my luggage. It leaked a bit on the flight back - the bottle it came in was, of course, unharmed, but the leaked DEET had started to melt the plastic "blister pack" that the bottle was packaged in. (Note to Cutter/Off/etc marketing departments: test your product on its packaging. ) I normally keep the DEET bottle wrapped in a sandwich baggie when it's inside my caching bag - leaks don't exactly melt the baggie, but it'll develop an odd texture. I had a brain malfunction one day and doused my old Foretrex 201 with 100% DEET - forgot to take it off my arm before spraying myself, didn't even think about it until I got home that evening - resulted in a few extremely tiny pits on the casing, although the display was unharmed. (I think the display is glass.) On the other hand, my largely plastic watch, the plastic fittings on my bike helmet, assorted plastic buckles on clothes/packs, and a number of other plastic widgets that I've directly or indirectly subjected to contact with DEET have been completely unharmed, and that's even with the high concentrations (95-100%) that I normally use if I'll be out in the woods all day.

Just as a "heads up", the Map display doesn't display the Hold Level message - only the Compass page provides this alert. Might explain why you rarely see the message if you don't usually have the Compass page showing. When I toggle on the compass to orient the map, I'll sometimes flip to the Compass page to make sure it's not whining at me, adjust my hand position if necessary, then flip back to the Map page.

According to SanDisk's press release announcing the 2GB microSD card, these should also be available for $99 at Verizon Wireless stores. (Verizon having exclusive sales rights within the USA for the first 60 days - presumably thru the end of Sep.) Hmmm, I wonder if I go anywhere near a Verizon store on the way back to my hotel...?

I first saw this a while back in "How To Display Poi On A Gpsmap60csx", but that thread fell off the front page a while ago and is now buried six pages down in the topic list. (I just happened to have this particular post bookmarked. )

I think you'll be pleased with the mount. The 60-series Garmin cradle should give you even more positioning options than my 76 cradle, since you'll have two hinges for adjusting the cradle's angle instead of just the one hinge that I have. You can't tell from the photo because of the angle I took the picture from, but the arm actually isn't being supported by the dash - there's a little bit of air between them. (You might be able to see the gap underneath the screw on the left side of the RAM arm - there's about the same amount of space underneath the arm.) On a clean smooth surface like a windshield, the suction cup has a very strong grip - I was pleasantly surprised the first time I tried it out. We always get together for an expresso and biscotti (birdseed-flavored, of course ) before we head over for our nightly chat with Odin.

Yes, that's essentially the setup I'm using, ProsperoDK - the only difference is that I have the 76-series Garmin cradle rather than the 60-series. I've only had this setup for a couple of weeks, but it seems quite solid. (The real test will be whenever I get a chance to take it offroading in my Wrangler. ) Assorted pics of the mount: <== Mount on windshield Sadly, not in my Wrangler - I'm on a business trip at the moment, so I'm making do with a Ford Cobalt. As a side note, the Cobalt is one of the few cars where I had trouble with the regular Garmin beanbag dash mount that I'd used previously. I don't know what it is with the Cobalt's dash (maybe it's made of Teflon ), but the beanbag mount just couldn't keep a grip. <== Closeup of Garmin cradle and RAM adapter <== Component view 76-series Garmin cradle on top, RAM adapter on bottom, screw from Garmin dash mount which fastens the two parts together (passes through arm on one side of adapter, through bottom of cradle, then screws into opposite arm of adapter). <== Teeth on cradle and adapter The RAM adapter has "teeth" on the inside, just like you find on the Garmin dash mounts, allowing the cradle to be tilted forwards and backwards to adjust the angle. The RAM ball+arm system allows further adjustments - makes for a very flexible system. This is the section of the mount that I'm a little uncertain about for offroading - whether the teeth will grip well enough, or whether the bulky 76CSx getting jostled around by the terrain will make the teeth slip and cause the cradle/GPSr to flip down.

Let me start by referring back to an older post I put together about jittery positions and their effect on bearings when "close to" versus "far from" a cache. I was talking more towards the magnetic compass in the 'S' models when I wrote that post, but the first few paragraphs are just as relevant for the regular non-mag-compass bearing display. The basic idea is that the closer you are to "ground zero", the greater the effects of positional jitters on the bearing displayed. Let's resurrect the 76CSx's data that I used in the earlier graphs in this thread, and use it to demonstrate what kinds of bearings I'd expect to see if I'd been standing outside that day and looking at caches that were (relatively) far away, fairly close, and extremely close. Let's start with a hypothetical "far away" cache - I'll just choose a random point that's about a mile away from where I took those readings, and we'll pretend there's a cache there. Rather than plotting bearings from all 180 or so positions that I recorded, I'll just choose every tenth point and shoot a line from that point to the cache location. I'd end up with something like this: So in this graph, the GPSr is sitting somewhere in the little clump of red points to the northwest, and the hypothetical cache is sitting off to the southeast. Not a lot of spread in the bearings - maybe I'd see the GPSr flicker a degree up or down, but it's going to be pointing pretty solidly southeast. Basically we see that even if your position is wandering around a bit, it makes virtually no difference in the bearing while you're far away from the cache. Now let's see what happens if the cache were closer, maybe around a hundred feet or so away from me. I'll use the same set of position points as in the previous graph, and again shoot bearing lines from them to a hypothetical cache location: Hmmm, now that jitter is starting to show up - there's probably a 30 degree spread in those bearings. Nothing's changed in terms of our positional accuracy - it's the same set of points I used in the first plot, it's just that those position jitters make a lot bigger difference in the angles when the cache is 100' away than when it was a mile away. If I were watching my GPSr closely, I'd expect to see the bearing mostly wavering over maybe a 10 degree area (since a whole lot of the points are clustered rather close together), but sometimes skittering even further left/right. The bearings are still potentially useful - if I'd been hiking from the southwest towards the northeast and saw bearing like this, I'd at least feel pretty darned confident that the cache was somewhere off to my right. If I were hiking in from the northwest heading southeast, I'd know that the cache was ahead of me, although I might not be sure if it was directly ahead, or left/right of the path. So let's do the absolute worst-case - what if the cache were practically right at my feet - perhaps just a yard or two away from me. Once again, the same points are being used for showing the bearing lines: Ye gawds! The bearing might be sending me anywhere! North, south, east, west - hey, there's a bearing line for any direction you'd like to walk in. At this point I'd expect to see really wide swings in the bearing - each skitter and jump in where the GPSr estimates my position can cause a huge change in the relative position of the cache coords. This is the scenario I was trying to illustrate in that post I linked to from a different thread with the magnetic compass - once you get really close to a waypoint, the bearing info is going to be much more bouncy/jittery/unreliable. Now all those graphs were with the 76CSx's position data, which as we saw earlier is grouped in a reasonably compact area. My older 76CS wasn't quite a tightly-packed, with a dozen large glitches in its position, but wasn't too bad overall. Still, I'd expect the bearings on my 76CS to wander over a wider range of angles than they did on the 76CSx, just because the points aren't as closely-packed. Could something like this perhaps explain the problems you had with the Legend Cx? Did it often have poor accuracy levels in the areas you were caching? (Poor accuracy == wider spread in position data == more rapid decline in bearing)

Garmin's FAQs on their current eBay policies (which can be summed up as "caveat emptor"): Q. Can I legally purchase Garmin MapSource software on eBay or any other online auction site? A. Yes, Garmin MapSource software may be purchased from online auction websites. However, there are many issues that can arise from purchasing software in this manner of which customers should be aware. Some Garmin MapSource software sold on online auction sites may be pirated copies. Many of Garmin's MapSource software titles are "locked" software programs, meaning that they are useless until they are unlocked. If the original purchaser of the software has already used the registration or coupon codes that were provided with the purchase for unlocking the software, Garmin is not obligated to create another unlock code for the second customer. Any additional unlock codes must be purchased from Garmin. Q. Does Garmin have any authorized dealers on eBay or any other online auction site? A. Garmin does not have any authorized dealers that sell new products directly on online auction sites. Any purchases made through online auction sites are on a "buyer beware" basis. A copy of the original sales receipt is required as the proof of purchase for warranty repairs. Online auction confirmations are not accepted for warranty verification and Garmin will not replace any missing components from any package purchased through an online auction. Q. I purchased my MapSource program from an online auction site, but when I try to use the program, it says the product has already been used. What am I doing wrong? A. If the software being installed has been purchased from an online auction site, it is possible that the original purchaser has already used the product. If the original purchaser has already redeemed the coupon or registration code from the software, any other additional unlock codes must be purchased from Garmin. Garmin will not redeem the coupon code for any additional unlock codes.

I understand what you're saying about the flexible arm situation. But specifically what "Garmin cradle" are you referring to-- perhaps a link to make sure we're talking about the same thing? If I'm not mistaken, Thrak is talking about the RAM-HOL-GA11U adapter. The lower holes connect to a standard RAM diamond plate. You then take a regular Garmin mount, remove its forward/backward adjustment screw (releasing the cradle piece), and then slip the Garmin cradle between the "U" section at the top of the adapter and thread the screw back through again. I think someone (might've even been Thrak) posted some pics of the mount in action, but I can't seem to find the thread right now. If there's interest, I can take some pics after work today - I've got a RAM base + adapter + Garmin 76 cradle setup out in the car.

SanDisk 1GB in a 76CSx, working just fine. For the rest of the questions, chalk me up as another "ditto what Neo_Geo said".

How is the setting done? Thought there is only one setting allowable - either "Track up" or "North up" and not depending on zoom level? On the Garmin 60/76-series, underneath the Orientation (North vs Track) setting there should be a "Below" setting that takes a zoom level value. (If you read the two settings together it might be a little more meaningful - "Track Up...below 5 miles") Edit to clarify: The "Below" option is underneath the "Orientation" setting if you're on the Map Setup - General page. (As opposed to the Satellite display's options menu, which provides North vs Track Up, but lacks the "Below" setting. )

In my mind that would definitely put your idea into the fun/cool category - go for it!

My two cents (a deal at half the price ) - if your store is something like a five'n'dime, where a $5 gift certificate is enough for a cacher to pick up something without laying out extra cash (like a munchkin-cacher picking up a Matchbox car or a superball, or an older cacher choosing ...oh, I dunno... a couple of handy-dandy bungee cords or a bobble-head dog for the back window of their cachemobile), then it might be a fun idea. If you're running a fine art gallery where someone would have to shell out a couple hundred dollars to buy anything with the gift certificate, then it's a bad idea. In the former case, someone makes a trade (hopefully leaving something worth about $5 ) and in return eventually ends up with a similar bit of swag - the cool/fun bit being that they get some choice about what form their swag ends up being, plus they might get to meet a fellow cacher. In the latter case, someone makes an honest trade and ends up with a "gift" certificate that's essentially unusable - not fair.

Just a thought, but has anyone outside the U.S. considered writing to the marketing departments of a European car manufacturer (maybe Land Rover?), tell them about the Jeep contest, and see if they might be interested in underwriting a similar contest with a Euro-centric focus? Picture thousands of ...ummmm...I dunno... BLRD (Black Land Rover Discovery) TBs roaming the countryside, Euro-cachers getting up at the crack of dawn or caching by flashlight for a chance to move a BLRD, etc etc etc. (And of course, us here in the U.S. begging someone to bring just one or two BLRDs over so we would have a chance to play. )