NickPick

As a PDA, the M130 is very good. 8Mb or ram, colour screen, available refurbished with 6 month guarantee from luzerntech.com for £50. As far as paperless caching goes, I'm not sure how much ram you need, but the M130 does take SD cards, so 128Mb should cost you around £20. There's an excellent guide to paperless caching at MarkAndLynn 's website http://uk.geocities.com/markdavis@btinternet.com/index.htm

It does not appear possible to switch off the front fog lights on many BMWs. Unfortunately, many BMWs were assembled incorrectly, and the fuse which feeds the indicator switch was mistakenly connected to the front fog lights, hence fog lights are always on, indicators never work. Heavily modified citroen Saxos also seem to suffer from this problem.

Well, I think that we should all give up this obviously dangerous and foolish hobby. And as for it involving an 'internet', that should have been the first warning.

The other software which I find useful is EasyGPS (www.easygps.com), which works with the downloadable .LOC files from the cache pages or in multiples from the search page. I've not used GSAK before, so I'll have to try that aswell. Nick

I do apologise for this thread veering off topic a bit, but I've not come accross this total distance function. I can't find reference to it in the manual. I've got an etrex euro running firmware version 2.20. I can't see a 'change fields' section on the nav page.

You should be able to re-set total distance (trip odometer) by going to the navigation page (the one with the compass) and clicking the enter button (bottom left) then select 'Reset Trip' and enter again. This will reset the odometer. If that's not what you mean by overall distance, what do you mean, as I've never seen another overall distance on mine. If there's a 'total covered by unit since manufacture', I'd love to see how far mine's gone. BTW, in your profile you say that you've been told the yellow fellow is rubbish. I'd disagree. It's basic, but it should be as accurate as more expensive units, it's very robust, and being yellow means it's easier to find under the bush you've just dropped it in.

I've not used a mapping GPS before, but I believe that the mapping tends to only show towns, roads etc. I don't think it's anywhere near the detail of OS 1:50000 mapping. I usually print out the streetmap.co.uk 1:50000 page and take that with me. I'm using a basic yellow etrex, but if I was buying a new GPSr, I might be tempted by the mapping units as the mapping could be useful when driving to the cache location. Depends on whether that's worth the extra 50% in price.

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/latlong.adp In case you haven't seen it, if you look in the pinned thread "Resources for geocaching in UK and Ireland", there's instructions for adding a button to your internet explorer link bar so that you can highlight a lat/long on the cache page, click the button and it spawns a new window with streetmap at that location. I only found it last week, and it's fantastic, and thanks to Gary and Jane for posting it. There's also a similar link in the thread for firefox users (which everyone should be), but we don't use that at work

Make sure the plod don't see that. They'll probably do you for speeding down the M1

But surely that's 47 in doggy years?

I think that my registration was virtually instant. If it's taken 7 days, I'd expect that it's failed for some reason and try re-registering. Check the spelling of email addresses very carefully.

Technical explanations are fine by me, but then, it has been said that I should get out more.

That is truly brilliant. What I now want to know is why there are no caches in Hemel Hempstead? Plenty in the surrounding areas though.

Yesterday lunchtime (12 Jan 05), I switched on my yellow etrex, and it took ages to get a lock. By ages, I mean over 10 minutes. I was standing still with it in the middle of a wide open area on top of a hill, and the advanced skyview was just blank. I had moved 70 miles since last switching it off 24 hours before, but it doesn't usually take that long to initialise. I was beginning to fear that the US military had decided that I was a threat to their national security and had withdrawn the signal from my location as a precaution. Has anyone ever experienced anything like this before?