Munin

Good catch, trezurratt - I missed that the Auto Nav Kit was still listing City Select. City Select has been phased out by Garmin, and no further updates will be released. City Nav v8 will continue to be supported and updated. (Basically in the past Garmin supported both product lines, marketing City Select for handhelds and City Nav for their automobile units. Then one day they woke up and asked themselves why they were spending time and effort maintaining two virtually identical products. So they decided to retire City Select, and tweaked their City Nav software to be a little more friendly for handhelds - City Nav v7 had huge map segments, unsuitable for use with older handhelds containing relatively small amounts of non-expandable memory, so one of the changes for City Nav v8 was to slice and dice the maps into smaller segments. Not as much of a concern with their newer "x" models where you can simply stick in a bigger microSD card, but it was an important change for just about every other handheld they'd sold previously.) I have both City Select v7 (on a 76CS) and City Nav v8 (on a 76CSx). At least here in eastern MA I've found them to be pretty comparable as far as autorouting goes. City Nav v8 is a little more up-to-date, but only real place I've noticed a difference so far has been one intersection a couple of towns over where CS always wanted to make a left turn - unfortunately, not a legal option there - while CN appears to be aware of the no-left-turn prohibition and correctly routes down to the next intersection, where a left is legal. Not sure if it's the firmware in the CSx GPSr or improvements in CN v8, but I also like the way directions through rotaries (aka traffic circles, aka roundabouts) are handled - on the 76CS GPSr with CS v7, it tried to guide you through each little segment of the rotary individually (go 50 ft on A Street, 50 feet on B street, 50 feet on C street, right turn onto D street), wherease the 76CSx with CN v8 gives the more concise and more usable "go to fourth exit on roundabout". (If the Chicago area hasn't had rotaries inflicted on its streets and you have no clue what I'm talking about, consider yourself lucky. ) Overall, call it 99.9% the same for routing around here. CN v8 also has the latest/greatest Points-of-Interest database, and contains several restaurants that were missing in CS v7. Given a choice, I'd go for City Nav just because it's a little more up-to-date, but it's an incremental improvement, not some massive rewrite with tons of new gotta-have features. Garmin should provide a free upgrade to City Nav v8 if you were to buy an Auto Nav Kit containing City Select - their policy has long been that they provide free a upgrade if you end up buying an older product after a newer version has been released. However, from what I've read in the forums here they have not yet created upgrade discs for CN v8 - right now they just have the full-up retail version available - so even though you'd qualify for one, it'd be a while longer before you could actually get your hands on a CNv8 upgrade disc. (For what it's worth, I had zero problems obtaining the City Select v7 upgrade after ording an Auto Nav Kit that shipped with the then-obsolete City Select v6. Hopped onto Garmin's website, filled in a short form, and less than a week later I received the CS v7 upgrade DVD.) If you're interested in the Auto Nav Kit, my thought would be to first call/email some of the online vendors and see if any of them have Auto Nav Kits containing City Nav v8 instead of City Select - it's always possible that updated kits have been shipped and that the information on the web sites hasn't been updated yet. (Probably a long shot, but hey, can't hurt to ask. ) If that doesn't pan out, it's a tough call. If money were no object, I'd just order City Nav v8 and pick up the 12V adapater and bean bag mount individually - taking GPSNow as an example, it'd be CNv8 ($119.95) + 12V cable (19.95) + 60C/CS mounting bracket ($25.95) + Friction Mount ($29.95) = $195.80 total, versus $159.95 for the Auto Nav Kit with City Select v7. (In the "money is no object" mindset, I might think "what's an extra $40 given that I'm already spending several hundred on the GPSr, maps, and accessories".) But that $40 difference in price almost covers the cost of a 1GB microSD card from NewEgg, or would make up nearly half the purchase price of the US Topo map software somewhere down the road (or simply dinner with the spouse/sig-other for being so nice about me blowing money on toys ) - so if I were trying to keep the toy budget under control I'd certainly consider getting the Auto Nav Kit even if it came with City Select instead of City Nav, and figure that for the savings I can afford to wait a bit until Garmin starts producing City Nav upgrade discs.

Kristian, most of your experiences sound very much like my own with my first GPSr (a Garmin Foretrex 201). Pretty decent out in the open, so-so under moderate tree cover, and sometimes erratic/poor/non-existant results in dense forests (tall dense stands of old pine were particularly problematic). Tall buildings in a city, narrow canyons, cliffs on the sides of mountains, etc can all present problems for GPSrs. Signals from satellites close to the horizon can be blocked by the buildings/mountains, reducing the number of satellites available for calculating your position. Satellites high enough to clear the obstructions may find their signals bouncing around off the walls/cliffs/etc, sometimes resulting in the same signal arriving multiple times via multiple routes (direct, bouncing off building 'A', and again bouncing off building 'B'), making it harder for the GPSr to figure out which version of the signal is the "real" one. Slow updates on your heading as you walk along may also be a sign of poor reception conditions (few visible satellites and/or multi-path). At least that seemed to correlate very well with my old Foretrex - the worse its accuracy got, the longer it tended to take to display the proper heading. (Possibly because if you only know someone's position +/- 15-20 meters, then they probably need to move a lot further before you're confident about their direction of travel compared to figuring this out when you know their position +/- 5 meters.) While it's possible to go geocaching despite these problems (I did over 100 caches with my little old Foretrex ), you can probably get a better GPSr if you want - there's been incredible improvements in reception and signal processing over the last couple of years. My 76CS was a big improvement over my Foretrex, and my 76CSx continues to amaze me. Since you're looking at a Bluetooth GPSr, you might want to take a look at the US GlobalSat BT338 receiver. (But shop around to see if you can get a better price than buying from USGlobalSat direct. ) I haven't used one of these myself, but a French colleague brought one along to a convention I attended back in November - it seemed to work nicely with his PPC PDA and he said he'd been pleased with its performance. The BT338 uses the same SiRF III chipset that the Garmin 60/76 C(S)x GPSrs use, so it should have similarly good performance under trees and even inside many buildings. (At the convention, my French friend was able to keep a lock walking around inside much of the convention center. The 76CS that I was using at that time just whimpered in frustration and gave up. Perhaps if he and I end up at the same spot this year I can try to keep up with him using my 76CSx, provided he hasn't picked up yet another newer/cooler toy in the meantime. )

Leaving the magnetic compass running continuously will drain the batteries noticeably faster - it's not as big a draw as running the backlight continuously, but you'll notice the difference in battery life over a full day of caching. I leave the mag compass off most of the time, and just toggle it on as needed (quick bearing check and/or reorienting the map page when I'm standing still). In my mind, there's little point in leaving the mag compass on all the time anyways, unless you habitually walk around with the GPSr held almost perfectly horizontal - if you normally carry the GPSr nearly vertical (hanging from the lanyard, clipped to your belt, etc) then the magnetic compass won't work right anyways, so what's the use in having it running? The setting that was mentioned (time/speed on the Setup->Heading menu) is for specifying when the GPSr automatically switches between the mag compass and the non-magnetic (GPS position-derived) compass. I.e., if you set it to 1mph/5 seconds, then as soon as you achieve a speed of at least 1 mph for at least 5 seconds, the GPS will automatically stop using the mag compass and switch to GPS-position-derived headings, and vice-versa if your speed drops below 1 mph for at least 5 seconds. It assumes that you're leaving the mag compass turned on all the time, and that once you drop below a certain speed you'd rather be using the mag heading instead of the GPS-position-derived heading. (Or conversely, when you're traveling at faster speeds, like in the car, it automatically switches to the GPS-position-derived heading - probably a good idea, since it's awfully unlikely that the GPSr is horizontal when you're using it in the car, rendering the mag heading useless anyways.) Personally, I wouldn't bother much with diddling these settings - you almost certainly don't want to use the mag compass inside a car anyways (unit isn't held horizontal with 99% of the GPSr mounts so mag heading is bogus, not to mention the effects of large chunks of ferrous metals on any sort of magnetic compass), and you almost certainly don't want to leave the mag compass running all the time when you're hiking to the cache (unit frequently non-horizontal causing bogus mag headings, plus increased drain on the battery). I think Cacheoholic has the best suggestion - make sure you're holding the GPSr almost perfectly horizontal when you're using the mag compass. It doesn't take much of a tilt at all to throw it off kilter...maybe 5-10 degrees away from level. You can get a feel for how level "level" is by calibrating the compass, then going to the compass page and slowly tilting the GPSr up and down and watching as the "Hold Level" message appears and disappears. This warning does not appear on the map page, so getting a feel for where "level" is comes in handy when you toggle on the compass to orient the map, like when you reach a trail branch and want to see which choice looks more appropriate. (When using the mag compass to orient the map display, I'll sometimes switch to the compass page for a moment to double-check that it's not screaming "Hold Level" at me and adjust my hand if necessary, then flip back to the map display to contemplate which wrong trail I should choose next.) Other minor tips: Make sure you hold the compass level while calibrating it - a miscalibrated compass is a royal pain in the posterior. Make sure you're not standing next to or under objects that might interfere with the magnetic fields - power lines, cars, etc. Make sure you're not accidentally holding something magnetic or ferrous near the GPSr while calibrating/using it - like, say, placing a regular old Boy Scout compass on top of your GPSr in an attempt to double-check the heading, or holding the GPSr at waist level if you have a large iron belt buckle. (I went a little bonkers during the winter until I discovered that the clasps on my gloves were magnetic. )

Hopefully this won't come off sounding snarky - that's not my intention - but it seems to me you could write almost the same thing about a geocache: 1 potential problem I see with this a cache [...] What is to keep someone from putting non-family items on it inside? remember there are kids that cache without parents and if they got their hands on it. What could they be viewing finding. (Cue a list of inappropriate trade items, like knives, lighters, cigarettes, booze, porn mags, etc.) Guess my point being that there's at least as much risk that kids will find bad/inappropriate/non-family-friendly things in a cache, probably even more so than finding something bad on a flash drive travel bug. Muggles can leave the most bizarre things in caches, either out of mischief or just plain ignorance. But it seems to me less likely that anyone other than a geocacher would bother taking a flash drive TB home, adding material to it, and actually replacing it in a cache. (If a muggle took it, I'd expect they'd just rip the dogtag off and keep the drive for their own use.) And I'd like to think that even if a warped cacher decided to store some highly inappropriate material on a TB like this, that it'd hopefully be noticed right quickly by the next cacher and the offending material removed, much like a cacher might trash out inappropriate material from a cache. (In the case of a TB, I suppose it'd be more proper to check with the owner before deleting questionable files - personally I'd give two thumbs up if someone added a picture like Snoogans' tasteful nude example up above, but I'd understand if the TB owner had a different opinion. In the case of something like hard-core porn, I doubt any TB owner would want the material to remain on the drive.) Inappropriate things could be left in a cache (indeed, have been left in caches), yet we generally manage to get along okay despite the risk, and people seem to be willing to help out when this happens. I don't see it being much different for a TB like this. A thought that comes to mind if you wanted to persue this idea for use in a cache. Some flash drives come with a built-in write-protect option - usually a little slide switch on the side of their housing. If you were to put your data on the drive, slide the switch to the locked position, and then superglue/epoxy the switch so it can't be unlocked, then you could rest easy about anyone being able to tamper with the data or add anything objectionable. Might even reduce the risk of someone stealing the drive for their own use, particularly if you had a note attached that made it clear the drive had been rendered unwriteable.

Whether or not the preprogrammed microSD cards are writeable is a question that's been posed by others several times in the forums, but I haven't seen an answer yet - apparently none of us here in the forums have invested in the preprogrammed cards. The closest I've found to vaguely authoritative info was the Garmin Blue Chart User's Guide, which cautions on page 4: To me this sounds like the BlueChart preprogrammed cards are writeable, so I'd expect the others (City Nav and Topo cards) are the same. However it also sounds like there's no way to merge in additional maps, like adding MapSource City Nav maps to a preprogrammed Topo US card or vice versa - if you transfer MapSource maps to the card, you blow away the original maps in an unfortunately permanent manner. Some thoughts that come to mind... A single preprogrammed Topo US card, like the Western Great Lakes you mentioned, goes for $76.95 at TheGPSStore.com. The full version of Topo US can be had for $89.95 at GPSNow.com. So one way of looking at this is that you can get 50 states of topo coverage for $13 more than the 7 states comprising the Western Great Lakes card. Of course, an equally valid way of looking at this is that if you're never going to camp/hike/offroad in any of those other 43 states, then perhaps there's not much point to spending the extra $13 to have their topo maps. Since it doesn't sound like you can merge in additional map sets onto a preprogrammed card (not without blowing away the original maps ), you'd presumably be doing a card swap whenever you want to change from City Nav maps (say, loaded onto the 64MB microSD that was included with your 60CSx) to the preprogrammed Topo West Great Lakes. If my understanding of the 60CSx layout is correct (I've got the 76CSx myself, which has a different card/battery layout), you have to open the back and remove the batteries to switch cards with the 60CSx. If you bought the full-up versions of both City Nav and Topo US and downloaded maps to a single microSD card, then you wouldn't have to open up the GPSr every time you transitioned from road to offroad. Switching cards is hardly the end of the world - I bet with a little bit of practice you could do this in under a minute - but perhaps a teensy bit inconvenient if you end up doing the swap-a-roonie half a dozen times on each cache outing. (Drive to parking, swap, hike to cache and back, swap, drive to next cache, swap, hike to/from cache, swap, drive, swap, hike, swap, drive, swap, hike, swap...you get the picture.) If you went with the full-blown versions of both City Nav and Topo US, the 64MB microSD card that came with your 60CSx is large enough to hold combined street and topo maps covering at least 75% of IL. Depending on how far you tend to roam on your caching/Jeeping/etc trips, this might be perfectly adequate. As a rough visualization aid, the following area with both street and topo maps would use 58.1 MB: There's plenty of games to play with coverage, of course - you could drop the Peoria and Champaign areas and pick up a mix of street and topo maps in WI or IN, for instance. (And of course you can always download a different combination of maps to suit specific trips - 64MB worth of map data should take well under 10 minutes to transfer to your GPSr, so customizing the maps for vacations and suchlike isn't a big deal. I used to frequently download different map combos to my 76CS for out-of-state business trips.) You've also got options for spreading purchases out over time to gradually increase the functionality of your GPSr without having to shake out the couch cushions looking for spare change. Perhaps start with City Nav v8, giving you autorouting (very cool) and a reasonably rich POI database that can be oh-so-handy for pre-/post-/non-caching activities. (My muggle g.f. and I have discovered that a copy of Zagat's restaurant guide and City Nav make a wicked combo for exploring new restaurants. ) As a reference point, you could fit City Nav v8 maps for all of IL in 51.3MB. Maybe a bit later on pick up a copy of US Topo, drop the street maps for the southern/southwestern portions of IL and move to a combination street and topo setup like the 58.1 MB example in the picture above. Then still later on, if you're exploring far and wide and the 64MB card starts feeling a bit cramped, go pick up a 512MB or 1GB microSD card. (You can always pick up a 1GB at a well-known online computer store like NewEgg ($41.99), but people have also found even better deals by keeping their eyes open for sales/rebates/specials at other online stores.)

Should be fine - here's an example of a 50.2 MB City Nav v8 map set that includes NYC and some of the surrounding region:

Michelle and John General form of a link in HTML: <a href="...cut'n'paste link to TB">TB name</a> Example: <a href="http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=642cfc2b-6487-43dd-abf9-6c1ded87a31f">John</a> would like to find <a href="http://www.geocaching.com/track/details.aspx?guid=2d9b12d6-2da1-46f7-b6f5-000214d3f086">Michelle</a> Which would come out on the TB's page looking something like:

Perhaps mention the Unknown location in the "grab from somewhere else" section - that sometimes confuses people. Maybe something along the lines of:

One note is that the US Topo 24K maps specifically cover national parks, national forests, and (some, small number) of state parks. These maps provide no topo coverage outside of those areas - i.e., they're not 1:24K topos for the entire east/central/west US. For wider topo coverage, Garmin offers their Topo US maps. They're only 1:100K, but they at least provide that lower-res coverage for the entire U.S., not just for selected parks. Between geocaching and your other outdoor activities, you might get more use out of the Topo US maps rather than the US Topo 24K maps (unless you spend a lot of time in national parks/forests). On Garmin's "On The Trail" page you'll find links to both Topo US and US Topo 24K, along with a handy-dandy MapSource Map Viewer where you can select each product and see the coverage provided. A 60CSx upgraded with a 1GB microSD card loaded with City Nav North America and Topo US (and possibly enhanced with US Topo 24K) maps is a wonderful piece of gear. Also consider getting a 12V (cigarette lighter) cord to cut down on battery use while you're driving. The Garmin beanbag mount (such as you might find in their Automotive Navigation Kit) works okay in a TJ provided you're on paved or well-graded dirt roads, but tends to go dancing around (and off ) the dash once you hit even moderate washboarding - RAM makes a wide variety of alternative mounts that might be more suitable for offroading. PDA questions I'll have to punt over to someone else - personally I use a Zaurus C3000, but that's far from being mainstream. You don't need to be a premium member to upload pictures, however the gallery section of your profile isn't quite a general-purpose gallery like Flickr/etc - instead it's populated by pictures that you upload when you log a cache or move a travel bug, so the gallery contents tend to be mostly geocaching-related experiences.

If you're mountain biking, then you might also consider getting the US Topo maps. For road biking, I'd think that City Nav v8 would do you just fine. I've used two different Garmin mounts for mountain biking (for the Foretrex I first started with and another for the 76 series that I've been using for the past year or so), and been pleased with both. Haven't used a Garmin 60 series bike mount, but I'd expect it to be fine. If you feel the itch for something super-rugged, RAM mounts are available for practically every people-moving device ever created. The POI software's had its ups and downs, but if you look through some of the forum threads you'll find people providing links to working versions. (I'm currently using the one that ProsperoDK linked to in this post.)

If you're running Windows, there's also Fizzymagic's handy-dandy GeoCalc program.

Once the shipment leaves Groundspeak, the timing is pretty much up to the shipping company's schedule. For what it's worth, I've placed several orders using expedited shipping (2-/3-day) when my erratic business trip schedule made ground shipping too much of a gamble, and the tracking info on those orders showed that Groundspeak sent the packages out within 1-2 business days after I'd placed my order. Standard ground is supposed to be 5-10 business days, so add in a day or two for Groundspeak to assemble and package up the order and your package might arrive just about anytime between today and a week from now.

Nice article, managed to cover the primary cache types in an easily-understood way, and had an upbeat, positive attitude throughout. Thanks for sharing that, teammaddog!

Oooh, I really like the green checkmark idea! More intuitive than my up+down arrow - "Checked on your TB", "Check, TB present and accounted for, sir!", "TB inventory time: Bob the Bug? Check. Tilly the Traveler? Check. Hank the Hitchhiker? Check.", etc etc etc.

My own crude attempt at artistry (which explains why I'm not quitting my day job anytime soon ): Vague thoughts perambulating through my brainpan were to combine the up/down arrows ("discovered" being sort of a "picked it up, put it right back down" thing), with a different arrow color ("green" == "safe/good/etc") to make it stand out a bit from the existing icons: Picked up Dropped off Grabbed Discovered ??? Okay, actually my first thought was to make a pair of eyeballs looking at the TB tag, but getting something like that working down in the 16x16 pixel size range was waaaaay beyond my cut'n'paste skill level.

Take a look at Sputnik's Garmin FAQ, in particular answer #9 in the Loading and Managing Maps section. Basically when you're on the menu where you can show/hide individual map sections, just hit Menu one more time and you'll get a screen where you can show/hide entire map sets. (But read the FAQ anyways - you might pick some other handy tidbits. I know I did! )

How about a combination of: RAP-B-224-1U locking suction cup: ...plus a RAP-B-201U 3" arm (for some flexibility in positioning/angling the GPSr): ...plus a RAM-B-238U 1" Ball w/Diamond Plate: ...topped off with a RAP-304U "Button Holder" (belt clip U thingy): There's also the RAP-304SU Button Holder w/Suction Cup, but since there's no way to adjust the angle I'm thinking it wouldn't be all that great for mounting a GPSr to the slanted windshield prevalent on most cars:

If you've got the plastic case that holds both an SD adapter and a microSD card (like the retail SanDisk microSDs come with), I'd probably use those cases - they're large enough that you've got a fighting chance of finding them again in your caching bag when you want to swap map cards. You could also put a label on the outside of each case to indicate which card and which map set is inside. Alternative might be to get one of those keychain pillboxes like a Bison tube: (I've seen similar containers in varying sizes/colors near the check-out counters of many drug stores. No geocaching logo though. ) Sure, they're totally overkill size-wise compared to the microSD card, but again the idea would be to have a large enough container that you don't lose track of the wee microSD beasties. As with the plastic cases, I'd also find it easier to label the Bison tube rather than attempting to put something directly on the card itself. Attach to your keyring, or a loop on your caching bag, or even to the lanyard for your GPSr.

Easiest way to find out how much is "enough" is to fire up MapSource, select City Nav v8, zoom out until to around 100 mi or more, make sure the Maps tab is selected over on the left-hand side, and then just start selecting all the areas that you'd like to have on your GPS simultaneously. There's a running total of how much memory you'll need down towards the lower left. The 64MB card that's included with the 60CSx should hold City Nav maps for all of MA, VT, NH, CT, RI, and the western section of ME - actually a pretty decent chunk of geocaching real estate. So if you need/want more maps than the 85% of New England that'll fit on your 64MB card, just keep selecting map segements until you've got the coverage you're looking for, check out the memory requirements down in the lower-left, and either buy a memory card that's sufficiently large to hold the maps, or just suck it up and go for the 1GB card anyways, since the pricing on microSD cards isn't proportional to their capacity anyways (leaving the 1GB card as the best bang for the buck). Keep in mind that if you've blown your "geo-toy budget" getting the GPSr and City Nav, it's really not a big deal to just select and download a different combination of maps to handle vacation/business/etc trips to other areas. I did that pretty frequently with my previous GPSr (a 76CS) for business trips, took maybe 10 minutes to download a completely different 115 MB of map data to that particular GPSr.

While on a business trip I managed to bend the pins on my laptop's power connector. I was going to drive around and try to find a hardware store, but decided to take advantage of the remaining daylight and do the Little Park Cache first. Found a mini tool kit in the cache, and the tiny screwdriver was exactly what I needed to lever the pins back into position.

NewEgg is one place you could get the SanDisk 1GB microSD card - $43.99 + S/H ($4.99 for 3-day delivery). This is the regular retail version of SanDisk's card, so it includes an adapter that lets you use the microSD card in a regular SD card slot (in case you already own a reader/writer or PDA with an SD slot). I've ordered computer gear from NewEgg many times over the years and had good experiences. They also carry a large variety of card readers. You don't really need one of these though - you can just install the microSD card in the 60CSx, hook up the USB cable, and transfer maps directly to the GPSr.

For switching between maps, see Sputnik's Garmin FAQ, specifically answer #9 in the "Loading Garmin Maps" section - he's got easy-to-follow directions and a screenshot.

When the description says that the City Nav in the auto navigation kit is "full unlock", it means that the kit includes an unlock code that will activates all the maps in the package. (That's standard for City Nav, regardless of whether you buy it separately or as part of the auto nav kit.) There are other Garmin mapping products that are subdivided into separate regions, with each region requiring a separate unlock code - for those, a single unlock code only unlocks part of the included maps. There's nothing special about the City Nav packaged in the auto nav kit - you'll get the standard unlock code you need to activate it for one GPSr, and you can get a second unlock code for free to use the maps on a second GPSr. It is not some different version of the software that allows maps to be downloaded to an unlimited number of GPSrs.

Perfectly fine. (I've been back to some caches half a dozen times or more to pick up or drop of TBs.) Just log your return visit with a "Note" instead of a "Found It".

Bison makes a gear-shaped keychain available in five colors. They're pretty small (1.75" diameter) and relatively inexpensive ($3.00 from Bison Designs). A lot of REI stores carry them (for $4.95), so if you have an REI nearby you could check the size/finish/etc out in person.