Sarteel

That's what the GPS is for. Don't look at the rocks. Find the cache by Lat and Long coordinates.

Does it irritate anybody that you can not download information from geocaching.com into the Geomate? I find it surprising. They sell it but they don't download into it. Geocaching.com can only download information into a high end GPS like Garmin.

It's just a TOY. I should have realized that when I looked at the web page where you order this thing. The pages show little children. AND if you read the words on the page - it's like the person who created the pages didn't really know what the TOY was supposed to do. I really don't like the thing at all. Even though it has only three buttons, it's hard to operate. The 2 buttons on the front are too simplistic so you can push the wrong button and change the cache on the screen and then you have to go all the way around through all 20 of them to get back to the cache you want. The arrow that tells the direction to the cache is never reliable. And the lat/long coordinates are so small that you can't see them unless you are in bright sunlight. I'll say it again - It's Just a TOY.

I am searching in a urban area and the direction arrow is rarely reliable.

I look at the maps on the geocaching.com website in satellite mode, so I can see where I'm going. I don't want to see which tree the cache is under. I just want to see the general location and whether I need to go around walls or water. Then I write down the latitude and longitude. I use my Geomate.jr in Lat/Long mode to find the cache. Remember - the whole point of this game is to use the multi-million dollar GPS system to play an inexpensive game.

Is everybody aware that Geomate.jr has a Latitude and Longitude screen? You can use the coordinate screens to find a cache without ever looking at the other screens.

Thank you for that useful information. I figured out that I had to turn it off and back on again but I thought it was also necessary to set the home location. The instructions are not clear on this point. Thanks.

"The jr has caches for all over the country and will show anything near you without resetting the "home" coords. Most users are reporting the device works very well to lead them to caches. Maybe your has a defect?" ======================================================================= If I am in a place that is not my home, and I turn on my Geomate.jr, it tells me how far I am from my "home" and then it tells me the 20 cache locations around my "home" - NOT my current location. If I want to find cache locations in this different area, I must change my "home" location to where I am. 1. Push both buttons to set my current location as "home". 2. Turn off the unit and the turn it on. This will re-boot the unit to the new location. 3. Now, with the new location, I see the 20 cache locations around the new home location.

OOOPS! WRONG BUTTON.

I am new to GeoCaching and I really want to find them but I'm frustrated by a few problems. I live in a city and there are no beautiful mountain trails or picturesque parks in the area. All the caches are either Urban type which are camoed or they are hidden in the trees in the parks. I have the Geomate.jr, so I can only see the caches around my home. (Oh yeah I know, I can reset my "home" to another location and look around there but that's a pain.) I can't pick and choose the places I want to go and download only those coordinates. And I can't download ANY coordinates from geocaching.com into the Geomate.jr But the biggest problem is that all the information about the locations of the caches are on the website. The coordinates are on the website but I can only collect them if I write them down on paper. Lots of the caches around here cannot be found unless you READ the notes about cache. How can I look for these caches in the field without the computer. SO... let's say that I want to look for a cache - without reading about it on the website: I look at my Geomate.jr and I see that there is a cache 250 feet away from me "in some direction". The direction pointer is unreliable and I might not know which direction I'm going. I walk this way and that way watching the distance to see if it decreases. And then I look up and discover that there is a wall in front of me. If I could see the computer and look at the satellite view I could see that I need to approach the cache from the road on the other side of this wall.