woggie

Thanks everyone for all the information, look forward to our ski trip and hope I can find a cache or two! I will pick up some chains just to be safe, not a real demand for those in Dallas!

CYBret, Great website, thanks for the link! I signed up and took the poll as well. I like the "Winter" caches we have done here and really dread the coming Texas Summer months. Since our Winter is not bad down here I doubt it counts like the ones we are talking about in CO. I will take some of your advice from the website to heart though while we are on our trip looking for some caches! Thanks again!

Madratdan, Thanks for the informaiton and help. I know the family is looking forward to skiing, only my wife has done it so it should be interesting for myself and the kids. I started looking at the caches in the area and it might be tough since most seem to be 20+ miles from Wolf Creek, although one cache is on some of the ski runs! We are staying outside of South Fork @ Lonesome Dove so I am starting to look at some caches to at least try in a couple of weeks, worst case we will see some great landscape! You now have me wondering about driving and getting around up there though, no 4x4 on the old Suburban! Thanks again!

zcubed, I don't know anything about mountains and snow (except it is cold), i am a city boy! What do you mean about snow not being a problem? From the link to Wolf Creek it looks like they have been getting a lot of snow over the season just not much the past few days. I am just not sure what all that means, I assume the surrounding area still has snow on the ground but don't know how much. I hope I can still find some caches while we are "skiing." Thanks for the education!

We are planning a trip in a couple of weeks to the Wolf Creek area and am wondering how well we will be able to cache in the snow. I assume we will have snow. If not my wife will be upset since she has been wanting to take the family skiing for years! I have started looking at the caches in the area and wonder how many I will be able to get with the snow.

Balidoy, I am sure you will get a lot of opinions on what GPSr to get, I have the Quest and I like it. It gives me the most flexability for use while on trips and caching. I get the voice directions while I am driving and with a quick change in the routing options I am able to use it to navigate to a cache. Does it have limitations, sure it does, but given the price and functionality you get with it to be able to use it in "both worlds" I would recommend it. As briansnat pointed out it does not have a field replaceable battery so that "could" be an issue. The most I have used mine on battery, without dropping it in the charger, is about (9) hours and it still had juice left. It charges pretty quick in the car/home charger. The one concern I have will be how well the battery holds a charge later down the road. The screen orientation is not a huge issue, IMHO, it is just different then the other ones. I hold it in the palm of my hand and have no problems navigating. You have a number of good choices in a GPSr that will meet your needs. I happened to chose the Quest to meet my travel/driving needs and caching needs all in one unit. It has the basemap built in, comes with City Select to get the detailed area maps, and has enough internal storage to hold a lot of maps, and it does not give me grief when I miss a turn! Well, not too much! Good luck on your choice, I am sure whatever you decide on will be great. On a side note, to Renegade Knight, I have actually dropped it while caching. It bounced off a couple of rocks and landed right in a big puddle of water, about had a heartattack. I pulled it out, cleaned it up, and kept on trucking. Don't want to make a habit of that though!

We bought a 29' travel trailer around Christmas, been out "camping" a few times already and have looked for caches in the areas we camped. We are planning a big trip to DC this summer and I have already started looking at the caches on the route and the area we will be staying! I wonder if my wife would get upset if I unhooked the trailer and went looking...Good idea though, opens up a little more area for finds if I did that!

I am using the Garmin Quest and love it. It comes with City Select so we will get all of the routing options while driving and it works well for caching at around $500. I am new to caching but have not had any issues using the Quest to do this. I may look at getting a second "lower end" GPSr to use with the Quest but am still on the fence about doing that. The main reason I am thinking of a second unit is so I don't damage my Quest while looking for a cache, it has come close to a couple of falls and almost went swimming! I know the Quest is somewhat "new" and the opinions on its effectiveness for caching differ but from my limited caching it works great.

Based on this thread I created accounts for my 6 & 10 yos. I never thought about them having a seperate account to log finds since they have gone with me caching. The question I have is should I "go back" and add them to the caches we found? I don't have that many finds but better then half of mine they were on or should I just let it go and let them start logging from today on? Thanks for the input. Thanks, jaw

If you upgrade to the latest version of Mapsource you can import the *.gpx files directly in. The one problem I ran into was if you have multiple *.gpx files you can not import them all into Mapsource and "show them" on the same map. If you use pocket queries then you can get a single file that will import into Mapsource. I use GSAK to sort, edit, etc. the waypoints then I export those into a single *.gpx file that is imported into Mapsource. Doing it this way allows you to import multiple waypoints from a single file. The long winded answer is "yes" you can import *.gpx files into Mapsource but you must upgrade to the newer version, the link is off the Garmin website. Hope this helps.

Greetings, I was wondering if anyone has been able to get MS S&T 2005 to communicate with the Quest. I like the functionality of S&T for placing the waypoints, etc. over MapSource but have been unable to get S&T to recognize my Quest. I have searched both the Garmin and MS websites but ot had much luck. I have also tried this on multiple PCs. Thanks in advance for the help! Thanks, woggie

I sat out in my parking lot for about (20) minutes and was able to "see" that id did register the WAAS signals and I would show 3D Differential and I would have the "D" on the signal strength bars. However, it appears it does not stay "attached" for an extended period of time. When I drove off it would come and go as well. The one thing I did find out, whether it is 100% true, is the WAAS system in this metro area is not officially "online" as of yet. I have a friend that is a pilot and he has been keeping an eye on WAAS in our area and the FAA has not reported that is is active. The few times I was able to maintain a signal it appeared to show better accuracy but have not been able to validate this. Thanks, jaw

I just enabled WAAS on my GPSr last week, I have been driving around town and have yet to see it actually enabled: Location: DFW Unit: Garmin Quest Eats batteries: Not Sure Accuracy improved: Not Sure Time to lock: Unable to acquire best I can tell The documentation for the Quest is not very detailed but from what I can tell it will show "2D Differential or 3D Differential" on the GPS info screen if it is running in WAAS mode. I never get this on my GPS.

I was also wondering about the value to using WAAS. It was off by default on my Quest, I enabled it but never saw that it was even active. I had it powered on for a good couple of hours driving around town (DFW area) and I never saw it in "WAAS" mode. Thanks, jaw