philthebottle

The original Legend, which it sounds like you have, will not autoroute on its own. Like was stated before, you can load the Garmin software onto your computer, have the software on your computer autoroute you (from a specific start point that you choose while sitting at your computer) then upload the maps, route and waypoints to the Legend. Personally, I think that autorouting would take half the fun out of it. Pick up a street map and use that or just stumble about until you find your way (you'll never know what you'll find). Both methods have done me fine so far with my old Legend.

My search and rescue team uses the monochrome version of the Garmin Etrex Legend. They're rugged and relatively inexpensive. We've dropped them on rocks, in the water, on the road, everywhere you can think of and haven't had a failure among the couple dozen units over the three years I've been part of the team. I've had my personal unit for about four years and have had no problems other than the thumbstick not wanting to work to the left and up occcasionally. Garmin offered to fix it, but I never got around to sending it in. They have an internal patch antenna, that although might not be as sensitive as an external antenna, the sleek shape doesn't snag on your gear while you're busy tending to more important duties. Also the screen is a little smaller than on the color version, but I'd think that that would make it a little more durable.

GPX can be downloaded as pocket queries, and also individually from each page. GPX files carry much more information than a .loc file. Basically everything that you see on the main cache page, hide and terrain difficulty, logs, etc. gets included in a .gpx file. Gpx files are limited to premium members, but for only $3 a month (or $30 a year), I don't complain. Remeber, the $3 also goes towards keeping GC.com up and running.

To get back to what WAAS is and how it works, here's the easiest to understand link that I've found: http://www.trimble.com/gps/index.html It's even got pictures for those of us who don't care for all that "reading the directions" garbage!

http://shop.garmin.com/accessory.jsp?sku=010%2D10267%2D00

This sounds similar to a question asked in another thread. He fixed it by making sure that the "Use USB" box was checked. GSAK will be looking for your GPSr on a serial port if you don't. Apparently a PDA will interfere with a serial transfer, but not a USB transfer. But I may be wrong.

I like the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (GSAK). http://gsak.net/

This is along the lines of etiquette, though a little different from the original question: I placed Love Charm TB in a cache this weekend. Out of curiousity, I track the bugs that pass my way. Tonight, on checking my email, I received a ton of notifications that the person who grabbed it has logged it in and out of aobut ten other caches in the past two days. Is this an attempt at running up their "find" number? If so, it's not working. I looked at their stats earlier, and their TB find count has not gone up after a few more drop/grab logs. Or does this person just not know how TBs work? Doing a bit of research, I noticed that they grabbed all three bugs that were in the cache and are doing the same with all three bugs... I'm assuming that this is considered poor etiquette, as no other bug log that I've looked at has anybody doing this. What gives?

Take a look at TopoFusion (www.topofusion.com). I think that might work for you.

I've actually used mytopo.com twice now. Haven't received my second map yet (my fault, forgot to put apt #! ) but my first one arrived in only a couple of days and looks quite nice. As for the data, all they have to go by is the latest survey data, and the map will look exactly like the preview (except you can fold the real map much easier than you can the preview!) I've run into similar problems with a map that I'd set up through their website. I tried other sites that let you order maps, as well as the USGS website. Everyone pulls from the same USGS data, so if USGS isn't current in the scale that you're looking for, you're out of luck. You might also want to check out www.topofusion.com. They offer software that will let you do just about everything that you want to with topo maps. Take a look!