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robertlipe

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Everything posted by robertlipe

  1. It's been a while, but I had great luck with the free OSM maps on a 60csx when I was carrying that combination, but I was also realistic that they were great for topo and recreational data but not as awesome at the latest subdivisions, the hours and phone numbers of businesses, and other things that were just better gathered by licensing data sets instead of relying upon volunteers. I don't even remember the site I used, but I basically selected what time zones (longitude bands) and continents I wanted and it mailed me half an hour later when the data was ready to download or, after larger SD cards came into vogue, you could just selected "pre-baked" bands for continents/countries/regions of interest. Even after I started road navigating with better suited hardware, I carried street maps on my hiking units just as orientation so I could know if I was walkign to or away from a road I could hear or see upcoming rivers to cross or such. Oh, I also used the OSM data when I was traveling out of country and needed maps for a week that I didn't want to buy for $100. Interestingly, they tended to be better in smaller, more rural areas because users had to make their own maps as the big providers couldn't justify it while a local was more motivated to make their own areas better. When I did the last real APE cache in Brazil, every water fountain was marked...it was quite impressive. I'm a reasonably technical guy and even my threshold of pain for building my own Garmin maps from the "raw" OSM data was too much. I always did the lazy thing and downloaded the rgn or img or supp or whatever they were called and always took the route of just removing the card and copying the files to the card from my (non-Windows) computrs. No way, no how would I spend $100 for a road mapping solution for a 60CSx in modern times. That $100 can probably get you two used Nuvis that include lifetime map upgrades AND the replacement batteries they're sure to need. Large, touch screens and spoken directions while you're driving vs the 60CSx is just night and day different. It's been a long time since I cared about this combination and custom carto for free is a committment that not everyone will undertake forever, so it's not totally surprisign that I recognize few of the players, but skimming https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download, gmaptool.eu (I'm in US) and OpenMapChest are the two that sound familiar, but my experience is from long ago. But this receiver is also from long ago. 60CS was 2004 and 60CSx was 2006. How about a different take on your problem? How extensive was your battery leak data? Can you swap the PCB from your old one into a less acid-eaten case and connector grid?
  2. Google Earth, of course, eats KML/KMZ as it's where that format originated. (Well, technicaly the "K" is "Keyhole" - the company Google bought whose product became Google Earth.) GPSBabel can read and write KML and eleventy hundred other formats, manipulate the date, and write them in the same variety. It's been open source and cross-platform since it was created some 22/23 years ago by a Very Awesome Dude, so if you don't like the way it works, you're free to customize it.
  3. As this post is paradoxical without any relevant details, I'm closing it as there is nothing on-topic that can come of it.
  4. Cool it with the condescension, you two. The quoted statement was "The Oregon x00/x50 series do not charge the batteries while inside the device." I amended that by pointing out that's not true for the later members of that family, with larger values of x. Atlas Cache is using some new mathematical convention where "x" = "x <=4" which of course any grade schooler will tell isn't how that works. If you look at a page like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes, for example: you don't get to define "x <= 4" at random times. The page would make no sense. I know you know the details of all these devices. I'm just pointing out that any x00 from the last 13 years will do it in some circumstances. I know you know those, too. No need to further squabble about it. Bergbauer. Don't lecture me on Garmin trivia without checking credentials and without actually reading the quote you're chastising me about. The quote was not about the 450. The quote clearly was about x00's (for all integer values of x), not 450. I even underscored that at the end: "So some Oregons ending in 00 will charge specific battery packs while in the unit that have ben specifically created ". 450 does not in in 00. 600 does end in 00. 700 does end in 00. We're done.
  5. Does not charge *that type* of batteries while inside the device. AC may have me on the model numbers. Some of the later Garmins will allow charging "Garmin approved" battery packs from the USB port, but it's late and I don't remember if that exact model will charge the batteries ... that you clearly don't have. Wait, looks like at least the 600's will do it: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B1QUF8O claims to fit the Oregon 600. So some Oregons ending in 00 will charge specific battery packs while in the unit that have ben specifically created and vetted to be less likely to exlpode. :-)
  6. Two days of moderate caching seems about right. If you want to stretch it, you can run the backlight down but on that era of devices, they're just hard to see in the daylight without strong backlight use. To save money on batteries and be a little kinder on environmental impact, NiMH rechargeables these days are really good. Eneloop is the most recognized brand, but there are lots of >= 1900mAh options around. I don't much recomment the actual Lithiums that are 3.7V and regulated down or the fancy ones that give up the top 1/4 of their capacity in order to have a USB connector built-in but there are many, many review sites around (I won't spam referral links) but a search ilke [rechargeable nimh aa batteries] will bring up many options. If you're Team Amazon Basics, those are fine options, too. Remember to pair them with an appropriate charger. I used a Ray-O-Vac 4-cell traveling charger when I was on the road and a fancy one with LCD display, reconditioning options, and a bunch of other nerdy features when I had 2+ days to rejuvenate a bucket of well-used ones. Remember to carry spares. When I was caching sun-up to sundown and a little beyond on each edge, I used to budget about two pairs a day and just not worry about backlight. That allowed easy charging in a 4-cell charger in the hotel overnight.
  7. To split the difference between a big geocache management app and chiseling on clay tablets, GPSBabel can also help with that, too. It seems obvious that GPSBabel can read pocket queries and loc files from the site, but it also knows about geocaching details beyond plain GPX. It's less obvious that it can write text files that contain the important parts of the cache data. It can similarly write html files if you want to preserve any markup that may be on the page. GPSBabel knows about difficulty, terrain, hints, cache type, container size, and all that other stuff and can write a no-frills description of the cache page in a simple form. To do this, much like you "convert" a GPX file that's a pocket query to Garmin Protocol on usb, you can convert to a text file and then scribble that in Google Docs (tip: mark it for offline use so it works when you have no reception) , mail it to yourself, print it, or whatever. gpsbabel -i gpx -f somepocketquery.gpx -o text -F - (you can do the drag & drop equivalent if that's your bag) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- GCGCA8 N35 55.300 W86 51.700 (16S 512480 3975269) Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo by robertlipe - Unknown Cache / Unknown - (3 / 2) The cache is not at the coordinates above. These coords will get you to the correct park and within 1/2 mile of the cache. The cache is within 35 feet of the trail. It is not handicapped accessible. It is a nice walk in the woods th [ .. ] Hint: There Is No Hint ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- GC7FA4 N46 08.000 W73 00.000 (18T 654491 5110806) Points géodésiques du Québec by Sverdrup2 - Locationless (Reverse) Cache / Virtual - (1 / 1) LES CO [ ... ] Or as HTML to get a little extra formatting, including links at the top and graphics. This is pulled into TextEdit.app where it'd be easier to reformat than in a browser, but you can choose your own adventure. It won't match Cereberus1's ability to cherry-pick the two sentences in a cache page that actually matter to condense it to a notecard, but if you DO branch into more than a few caches in a hunt, it can nicely condense things down into a pocket full of data, whether that's on your phone or a pocket-sized printout. Either print the page as-is or pull it into your favorite word processor for hand tweaking if that's your thing, but sending it to your phone is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in modern times. This feature comes from the days before GPSes recognized Pocket Queries themselves (like the Garmin 60CSx in question, though it was really the last generation that didn't) and we were often caching with PDAs. Also useful to that generation of hardware, use the smart names to get "TheTroll" instead of GC1234 on your GPS screen. That's under 'More Options' from the front page: For these two examples, that would get you "Oozy Rat" and "Points géodé" (I think it'll do the diacriticals on that model) On the command line, use -Sn for Smart Names and -Si for Smart Icons. That'll highlight multis vs. virtuals vs. puzzles on the map screen to help you decide which direction to drive when picking your next hunt. It's a bit funny to have this conversation because 22 years ago, I spent a long time looking for a cache (I think it was my fifth or sixth hunt) in the wrong place exactly because I did mistype the coordinates into the receiver. That's when I started looking for a program to do that, didn't find one I liked, and then sat out to create what became GPSBabel. Cereberes1's solution works for him and it's a fine approach if it works for you. I'm just saying there are options. The 'text' options came around when I planned a road trip to Disney (in the era before Pocket Queries) and didn't really know where I'd stop along the way. I had a big dumb box of printouts and couldn't find anything when I needed it when we stopped for a break. (Sure, it should have been sorted and in a binder. I lacked that foresight at the time because the act of printing many, many dozens of pages had already worn me out...) So I built tools that worked for me.
  8. GPSBabel still supports them. For Windows USB, you may need a driver from Garmin that may be hard to find and/or may not work on contemporary OSes
  9. Photos aren't well supported in various software because Groundspeak doesn't make it easy to get a PQ that includes photos in any real way and getting access to the Groundspeak API to develop modern applications to survive the various API changes has been sub-awesome. So it's a pretty small pool of tools that even can do it. Hopefully, few of us here will tell you how YOU want to go geocaching, but a couple of us with long tenures and plenty of experience are saying it's not worth the bother. If you have a cache (try something the GeoWoodstock event pages...) that has a zillion photos, it will take forever to scrape the photos and write them to your SD card but worse, when you're in the field and you load that page and that tiny little ARM processor starts to load, resize, and render a zillion images to a 240 x 400 screen, it will pretty much cough up its skull. So they're painful to get, painful to load, painful to display, and not really that useful while you're hunting. Additionally, when we created GPX, we left it pretty loose how media might be associated with a GPX file. Unlike KMZ, for example, there's not a convenient way to associate additional files, like images or movies, with the GPX data itself. We left it open-ended whether they may be <img> or href targets or be resized or even how they might be named. So if you're putting images on an SD card that has to obey 8.3 filenames and start with 5 PQs that each have 1,000 images, it's up to the application generating the result to be sure that an image named "fire.jpg" or "IMG043.JPG" in files 1 and 3 each have to be stored and referenced correctly so now they're only somewhat independent. These are solvable problems, but it's just another peek into the sausage factory of how software gets made and one more reason that it can be frustrating. Oh, and there's an integrated photo viewer in some of the Garmins that gives you pan and zoom, but you have to jump through yet more hoops to get the photos into the right place/format to make them visible both withing the Geocaching "app" and the photo viewer. The Magellans that did this (the [567]10's from the early days of the Mio era) did all of this annoyingly differently, so if you were writing software to do this, that was another obstacle you had to justify at the time to see if it was even worth it. The technical challenges exist and are all solvable. I spent some effort on automating this in the Palm/OS era when I was an active hunter and lots of logs had pictures and didn't consider it a break-even on effort. I'm with Mr. Bike above - if the last log is "the hiding spot has been compromised, so I put it 200 feet away at the location in the picture", I'll take the time to load it from cell.
  10. It's not comforting and I haven't looked at a "new" Garmin in a couple of years at this point, but that's the way Garmins have worked as long as I can remember. Without inside knowledge, but knowing more than a bit about electronic cartography, I suspect the design decision is that those have fixed styles because the style indicates prominence and are thus styled internally based on heuristics like size. Bigger city == bigger, bolder styling that allows it to be picked over a smaller suburb. It's probably better to make a stylistic choice and quickly display "Toronto" onto a map and save the compute-time to even think about whether or not you can render "King East" without obscuring other map details. There may also be safety and support reasons. If you somehow set the waypoint size of your waypoints to be microscopic or invisible, you can probably intuit that it's something that you did and that there's a way on your device to undo that. If Jr. is pushing buttons on your GPS while you're napping and turns off city name labels, the device is much less useful to a lot of people and that may generate a (non-free) support call or email or worse, an RMA or even return. That may not be the reason, but companies do have to think about these kinds of things. It's possible (though i'd be surprised by this in 2023 - less so in 2003 - that the text is "baked into" the map vectors themselves or even on a raster layer. That would be terrible for translation and even things like rotation, but it would allow faster draw calls, so it was a more common tradeoff back in the old days. I worked on and with a number of mapping programs and labeling effectively and limited resources (there's ALWAYS a limit somewhere - what works well on the wall-sized map for the weatherperson to touch works poorly on that battery-powered device in your pocket) is much harder than it sounds. It's quite possible that NOT leaving everything to user choice was a conscious design choice. :-) Let us know what you found out.
  11. It's pretty clearly not a device targeting the power geocacher market. If you're a multi-day backpacker or maybe long-haul cyclist that legitimately spends a few hundred hours of activity without access to electricity, but still needs orientation to nearby cities for help, preloaded waypoints, and/or just needs a breadcrumb trail to return you whence you came, they may make sense. Maybe you log a geocache along the way at the summit. Maybe. But it's not the primary purpose of the unit. It seems to have the same level of mapping that the eTrex of recent years has had - a very very limited (28MB? MEGAbyte) basemap that you can refresh from your phone. I'm not sure if your phone needs a signal to pull this off or if you can siphon over a preloaded map from when you had service. You're just not going to get a color screen and turn-by-turn directions and maps for a continent in a device that claims 200 hours from a single charge. If you need turn-by-turns, you have access to power. Knowing that flash memory that small really doesn't take less power (it's built on older process nodes) and probably commands a price premium just for being less popular, it does seem likely that a 28MB map is artificially restricted. A 64GB basemap doesn't make sense and if you had a GB of basemap, the first questions everyone would have would be "how do we load detailed maps or topo maps or birdseye or...", it'd all be distracting. So it's likely artificially 'dumbed down' to keep it on par with its namesake from 2001 or whatever. Like Astro or the various fitness or marine or aviation units, it serves a market. That market probably isn't driven by price and they don't always overlap with geocaching. If you're 200 hours from an electrical outlet, the weight of a spare power brick or a bucket of AA's is a big deal. They're probably on trails or paths and have paper maps just for survival, so detailed mapping with elevation contours and such just isn't necessary for them. I think the last posters reaction will be that of MOST geocachers, but that's OK. This unit wasn't built for geocachers. That's OK.
  12. I'm not sure if that's a declarative or interrogative statement, but perhaps is would be more appropriate in a group where the native language is closer to your native one. (Sorry. That's not judgmental; it's just statistics based on our readership/participation..) This group is dominated by English speakers. Your best chance of getting help - or getting appreciation if you're giving help - is to communicate in English, even if that means using something like translate.google.com. I think you're asking if any Garmin can record a default 'found it' long with additional text. If that's the case, it really is up to whatever software (GSAK, etc.) sits between your GPS and the upload API to search and replace that text on the way.
  13. I don't remember much being updated on that unit since it shipped. You can try magellangps.com, but frankly I wouldn't expect a lot given how many times they've rolled over the product lines since then. I would also be weary of downloading software for these from sites you've never used before. These are tiny little mobile Windows PCs (like a PDA). They have all the security and robustness you should have grown to expect of a Microsoft-based product and it's easy to imagine Bad Guys grabbing an Explorist Windows update (in the days when they were plentiful) and modifying them in nefarious ways, waiting for you to attach it to your computer and then steal all your unmatched socks and send them to a kid's basement in Bucharest or something. So be careful of downloads from untrusted sites. https://www.magellangps.com/map-update-scam-alert - and some of those sites that are highly ranked on Google are pretty doggone convincing. Even most of the little fan-hosted sites have shuttered their doors for Magellan device support in recent years. If you've replaced your "destroyed" unit with a one that works and you trust it to survive a factory reset, I'd reset it and move on. Moving from 2007 maps to 2009 maps (or whatever) is likely to be such a small change in practice that if you can't get the update from the factory, I wouldn't stress about it. Good luck P.S. Two Explorist support items top the page here right now. They're clearly staging an uprising. They're going to be the next Vinyl!
  14. Oh, man. Egged on by Atlas Cached, I was looking at the reviews on Amazon. Looks like I missed one cheap shot. This cannot stand! Looks like they kept this much loved feature present in all of their devices since about the 60C or so. Quoting a geocacher from an Amazon Review titled "returned it": "the device regularly froze up on me, and when frozen, the only fix was to remove the batteries and start over." People LOVE that feature! Dear Garmin. Wrap the code in an exception handler, add a watchdog timer. Have the code regularly checkpoint its current state, such as "actively navigating to and viewing the cache page of GC1234". Now, when either of those "oh, we can't really find the bug, but Something Bad happened" cases trigger, the device will reset. Upon reset, skip anything that takes more than a tenth of a second and longjmp directly to restore that state. If you do this well enough (I won't name names...but doing this FAST is the key) users may not even notice that their device just crashed; only that it glitched for a second or so. Of course it goes without saying that you should collect anonymized crash records that remove PII and offer to submit them for analysis, actually analyze them, and then produce and distribute fixes. Sure, keep a count and if it happens, say, three times in a minute or something crazy, just give up because you have a bug that's bad enough to have to actually fix or a user with broken RAM or a cracked solder joints or something intermittent and continuing to reset isn't going to change that.
  15. For those of us that have been in this sport (and this forum) forever and watched the long-term trends, it's interesting to have watched the tides come and go on this one. In the first 5+ years, we see a growth of the GPS business in general, rich competition, models with interesting new features each year, models that didn't feel like spray-painted versions of each other, etc. ~2007: You think I'm taking a ~$600 slab of glass into the woods without reception and risk water damage? Are you mental? My GPSes are WAY more rugged, get better reception, and have a battery that lasts more than 4 hours. 5 years pass. The advantages of a Q-H antenna are negated by better correlators in newer GPS receiver chipsets made possible by economies of massive scale. The digital bits are better at finding the signal noise in the space haystack that changes to the RF/Analog side become relatively insignificant. You can finally start to type logs in the field and synchronize them later. 5 more years pass. Phones get Gorilla glass, carrying cases, 2 and 3 day battery life, offline support, etc. really gets good. Now Garmin builds an outdoor unit that works in the daylight. 5 more years pass. Having had no competition in handheld GPS for many years now, many components of Garmins - including relative price, customer service, many terrible user interface choices, and that stupid rubber band failure - remain unchanged since geocaching first became possible in 2000. 2022 (Paraphrased as we've now seen more than a few people make the same post that @tr_s just did. "My four tenured Garmins physically worse out and all failed identically. I'm totally OVER Garmin.Go, team Cell Phone!" [b]2023 "Buy a the black&white eTrex with the yellow screen."[/b] That last entry is really a twist I didn't see coming while living through epochs of posters coming and going through the years.
  16. Since the OP didn't say "thank you", I will. Thanx for the good answers, gang. MikeD, it's good advice on all the Garmins. Sometimes the units will hang and crash while scanning a GPX. If you can just remove the card which means the unit can boot without scanning *any* PQ because it'll know that its internal database will be >= the internal flash and the external (removable) flash is no longer in play. When you turn on the GPS in the morning for the first time, in the dark after a 30 minute hike to start the day and your GPS won't boot, being able to remove the SD card just to begin a calm "reboot then put the card back in again" loop can be a good feeling. Oh: and I fixed the subject, per our FAQ.)
  17. Please change the topic to something useful that will help attract the attention of the people with the skills you need. "Help needed uploading pqs to Montana 700" or something. For whatever reason, my superpowers aren't effective right now.
  18. I probably took that same cruise back in 2002 or so. :-) Since you're presumably always within walking distance of the docks, I'd assume cell coverage would be adequate, though you can always check the coverage map for your provider. At the time I went, there were comparatively few physicals (no locals to maintain them then) and mostly virtuals that you could have handled with (gasp) paper or just downloaded/pinned Google Docs (or Everkeep or whatever note-taker you like) and even the crudest GPS app. You're just not likely to be scampering off a boat and into a 13 mile hike in the bush that NEEDS awesome reception or superpowers. If you're concerned about coverage, you can still use pocket queries and offline maps even on your phone. Enjoy.
  19. Not really a GPS question... This is exactly why hunting multis and adventures are no fun while traveling. Someone will think it's cute to keep stringing you on one more mile this way and one more mile and one more mile and now you're so committed to it that you can't give up, but you've driven/walked so far away from where you actually wanted to start that it's just aggravating. I agree with HHL that your map is too busy and not really helping. Finding a better basemap or turning off details or whatever is necessary to improve the signal:noise to let your icons punch through will help. If the question is how to solve the "how long is the rope" problem of knowing how many stages there are or how far apart they are, the answer is "no".
  20. As moderator, I should fuss that this is a different topic, but it's my thread, so... whatever. That's an impressive find. Those were epically terrible! Personally, I'd open it up. IIRC there's a row of pins at the bottom. They're probably of the variety of .100 posts or the crimp-on ends that we all inventory. Crack open the case and find the power and ground. That'll leave Tx and Rx. TX (from the GPS) will be driven into a mark state when powered on and will be easy to identify with your oscilloscope. Rx will float at high impedance. Those may or may not work with that code that was removed above. Honestly Trailblazer was gone before I started in '01 and don't think I ever had a single person even ask about them during all of GPSBabel's development. It would PROBABLY work as a plain ole NMEA receiver - just like a modern $3 GPS GPS will. This may be a task for a 3D printer. Honestly, you're going to have to want this pretty badly if you can't just find one.
  21. @WolfWalker, as advised above, please keep your current copy of GPSBabel because as announced on the GPSBabel group over a year ago, the next version won't support Meridian. Indeed, it ends all Magellan-specific formats. X10 units (510, 610, 710, GC) will still eat industry-conforming GPX files, of course. It's funny how Garmin has sold like a half dozen different devices colloquially known as "the little yellow one". It could be an eTrex10, a Vista HC, an original B/W Serial, a USB- Vista, etc. They don't actually have much in common...other than being, well, little and yellow.
  22. I think you misspelled a few words, luvvinburd. :-) I'm kind of with the lynch mob that's forming above. They've been releasing some variation of the same code since, what Colorado days and yet every new release - even when the release is "add one more set of satellites" always is contemptuous. It just doesn't make sense how they seem to regress Every. Single. Time. Disclaimer: I don't have one of the receivers in question and this is more of a comment on two+ decades of observed performance.
  23. If you ever want slightly more, owing to the days when geocaching with a refurbished Visor was the bee's knees, we do still have the 'html' and 'text' output modes that are super handy for printing. It's a bit non-obvious but you can "convert" a GPX file to a text file and print it which gives you the minimal text, optionally logs and decodes the hints, and gets rid of all that slow and ink-consuming gibberish around the page. Get some use from that premium membership. :-) But I do remember the days when it was about hunting an ammo box in the woods, reading the cache page before you ever left the house, and not wanting to mess with any tech at all because the whole point of hunting tupperware in the woods was to GET AWAY from tech, so I admire it in a sentimental way.
  24. You're not WRONG, but you should probably be careful about planting such a flag in the ground. It doesn't bother ME and I'm well aware of the struggle in trying to get your hobbies of helping others to be supported by others, but be forthcoming about it. After visiting those links, any purchases made within 48 hours generate a commission to whomever owns that Amazon tag. To get ahead of it, I've run advertising on my sites for years and they've paid the bills. If I relied on donations to cover my battery costs, I'd have shuttered them long ago. If I can steer this back into more constructive criticism, the ability to actually link to a page or a topic on the site would be SO helpful in actually having conversations around it. "Here's 20GB of info. Go Fish!" isn't as helpful as it was there there was 200K of info on that kind of site.
  25. Stupid Garmin tricks (and because I had the GPS and ALL the required adapters[1] within reach, making me a packrat...) I fired up a 60CS on my 2020 M1 MBP . OS 13.2.1 (22D68). ➜ ~ lsusb Bus 001 Device 001: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. Composite Device Bus 000 Device 000: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. USB 3.1 Bus Bus 000 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub ➜ ~ gpsbabel -i garmin -f /dev/cu.usbserial-110 36.090683N 86.679550W GC1A37/THE TROLL BY A182PILOT & FAMIL -0.114380 35.996267N 86.620117W GC1C2B/DIVE BOMBER BY JOGPS & FAMILY -0.114380 36.038483N 86.648617W GC25A9/FOSTER BY JOGPS & FAMILY -0.114380 36.112183N 86.741767W GC2723/LOGAN LIGHTHOUSE BY JOGPS & FA -0.114380 36.064083N 86.790517W GC2B71/GANIER CACHE BY SUSY1313 -0.114380 36.087767N 86.809733W GC309F/SHY'S HILL BY FIREFIGHTERENG33 -0.114380 36.057500N 86.892000W GC317A/GITTYUP BY JOGPS / WARNER PARK -0.114380 36.082800N 86.867283W GC317D/INLIGHTING BY JOGPS / WARNER P -0.114380 35.972033N 87.134700W GCEBB/MOUNTAIN BIKE HEAVEN BY SUSY13 -0.114380 Or...see attached for GUI proof of life. So, almost 20 years later, GPSBabel is STILL supporting combinations that Garmin never did[2]. I don't think they supported any serial devices on MacOS because serial was pretty dead by the time they arrived to the party. Those 11 geocaches have been part of GPSBabel's "touch test" suite since early 2002 when "GC3abc" cache IDs were new. 60CSX had a very similar serial implementation (D109's instead of D108's) and a loosely similar USB implementation (it bounced between contro and data pipes instead of staying on the data pipes) but I'd expect it to work the same. That unit is from 2006 instead of 2004. I'll admit that my biggest surprise was that the USB serial device was still supported by MacOS - especially on M1 - which isn't exactly famous for being sentimental about hardware compatibility. I was prepared to have to wire an FTDI 232H, CH340, or other newer USB/async bridge of the "Raspberry Pi Era" just for newer serial silicon. Now I can swipe this whole pile into a box and get it off my desk... [1] USB-C->USB-A->PL-2303->DB-9->Garmin Round connector. [2] But we never supported everything imaginable. Notably, GPSBabel doesn't do MAPS and you can't just write to a card like on 60CSx, so any serial-only Garmin on a map that needs a map transfusion will still need to find something other than Basecamp to do that lifting for them, though GPSBabel can do waypoints, tracks, and routes. I think that OpenStreetMap used to have such a tool, but we're wandering into speculative weeds.
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