robertlipe

Mass Storage is supported, but really only useful for copying tracks, and you have to put the device into a mode for that to even work. It's possible to transfer maps, but it's WAY faster to put the card in a dedicated reader. It's quite clear that Mass Storage for this line of products was an afterthought that was bolted onto a 2004-era core. See the FAQs at http://www.gpsfaqs.org/faqs/garmin/xseries/glegendcx/ You need drivers with Windows. On Mac and Linux, it's up to the apps to implement the comm proto. GPSBabel, for example, requires drivers when running on windows and does its own bit-banging of the protocol on OS/X and Linux.

GPSBabel has been part of every Google Earth for Mac, Windows, and Linux for Free, Plus, Pro, and EC since 2006 or so. I can't recall if it shipped as part of Keyhole EarthViewer before the purchase by Google, but we were certainly working together even before what became Earth became a Google product. I didn't join Google until 2007, but have worked on Earth since. GPSBabel is how Earth reads a bucket of formats (NMEA, Mapsend, Mapsource) and all the GPSes it supports (a subset of what GPSBabel supports) and it's a bonus that you can drag and drop an (unzipped) Pocket Query into Earth and get logs, maps, custom icons, hover states and more right in Earth; I was the one that knew the right people at Groundspeak to get permission for icons, to render the JQuery into a balloon, and was the one that slung the bits to special case Pocket Queries into KML and thus, Earth. You're welcome. :-) Since someone is sure to ask, I don't really do BaseCamp and I've never really considered myself a Windows Programmer, I remember being uncomfortable when Garmin engineering asked me if it was OK to call Earth's GPSBabel to convert to KML and launch Earth (and told them that) for the very types of reasons discussed here. When Pro was $400, there wasn't a lot of crosstalk, but now that it's free, there is. I can't speak to future plans, but you can guess you're not the only one wondering if there will be two builds of the same program forever at the same price point because, well, that's just odd. It happened before when Plus was collapsed into Free...Plus is now a distant memory for most of us.

This isn't obviously geocaching related, so it's on thin ice here... Earth (via GPSBabel) reads the active track. Since eTrex damages tracks when saving them (http://www.gpsfaqs.org/faqs/garmin/xseries/gvistahcx/tracks.html) that's a reasonable default. The saved tracks are just GPX files that you can drag and drop from your mounted storage device into Earth for display. The track will be missing times, altitude, resolution, per http://www.gpsfaqs.org/faqs/garmin/xseries/gvistahcx/tracks.html#types - that's why you really want to never manually save tracks and take the steps in "preserve them" on that same page.

On the "you have to be moving" compass thing, it's true that this model doesn't have one, but you can work around that. Get a flat map compass (easily under $10USD) so you always know where north is. Now spin your GPS "N" to match the direction the compass is pointing. Now your arrow points you to where it thinks the destination coordinates are. You have to hold it parallel to the ground for this to work well. I did this for years with a cheapo Suunto before integrated 3D compasses were common. Kept it clipped to the case holding it and it wasn't THAT much of a hassle because I'd sight the direction to leave the car while still moving. Only during the last few dozen feet when the going got slow would I care. Usually knowing "30 feet that way" was enough that I'd walk and start looking and then unclip the compass for this after coming up empty to narrow down the search a little. I can't say I _miss_ those days, but I found a few thousand with that basic technique....

Three meters is about the limit of consumer GPS under ideal circumstances. If the cache was placed with ideal circumstances (clear view of the sky, good equipment, coordinates averaged over time, the user didn't mistype the coordinates when placing it on the site, etc.) and you're searching with ideal circumstances, even then 30 feet isn't totally unexpected. If you have, like, trees or you're in an urban canyon, or a real canyon, or a third of the sky is obscured by a mountain, or the person took coordinates with their phone while standing over it and averaged them for four seconds, or whatever, 30 feet is quite reasonable. I once heard someone say "The GPS kept sending me ten feet this way and twelve feet that way and it was difficult because I kept tripping over this hollow stump..." At some point, you put the equipment down (I often hang mine in a tree...) and just start looking. Welcome to geocaching and good luck!

Moderator note: this thread has wandered around all over the place, making it less useful for future people to refer to an actual question with an actual answer. Please try to keep threads focused to the question asked in the OP. Failure to do so will result in threads being closed and if there's an escalation or continued pushing of boundaries, I have to start quoting rules and making naughty lists. I don't _like_ quoting rules and making naughty lists, so please make it easy for the mods to make it easy for the audience to help posters with focused questions get clear, factual answers. While it's fun to discuss censorship and amendments, it's really not appropriate here. This is a tech forum run by a company and moderated by a mixture of employees and volunteers (including me) that get to choose how their resources are spent. Groundspeak chooses to not let their forums be used for tech support issues for niche issues, which is what that post was. There was a time when c:geo (there, I said it) and Groundspeak had a much more hostile relationship. I could list reasons, but it doesn't matter. Today, the case is that they publish an app that violates the site's terms of use (that you agreed to) so the relationship remains rather more clammy than, say, Garmin (not niche) or GSAK (notice how traffic is unceremoniously sent to their support forums? Clyde and the team at GSAK actually support the official API as partners...) Heck, I have one of the oldest apps around that supports Geocaching and also happen to be a moderator and I don't allow Groundspeak forums to be used for tech support of that app. There are many apps that use the API; a list is at https://www.geocaching.com/mobile/partners/ instead of reducing site performance via automated page scraping or otherwise violating the Terms Of Use, so please focus on those. So, back to OP's question, which seems to have largely run its course - since it's been asked regularly here for years - please help steer tm2fam to a GPS to buy, either by answering the questions asked or linking to any of the many existing threads where this has been asked. Thank you for helping keep the moderators non-grumpy.

If it really is UTM, anything to the right of a decimal point is likely to be fantasy precision. Sub-meter precision is rarely associated with consumer grade gear or geocaching. Centimeter precision is almost surely fantasy. The absence of a zone in your UTM citation makes me wonder if it really is UTM. Do some research on UTM at, say, https://www.maptools.com/tutorials/utm/quick_guide and ask yourself if you're REALLY dealing with UTM at all. There are an obscene number of ways to represent the position on the planet in a "pair" (give or take) of numbers (that can sometimes contain letters). Signed, GPSBabel creator.

With such a vague requirement, nothing is going to fulfill it. "Eighty three degrees and sixty four one hundredths north" isn't likely to parse in most software. If you have even some vague structure, GPSBabel may be able to help. Signed, GPSBabel Creator.

You can indeed copy precooked OSM to and from the SD card - either sloooowly via the device's own USB mass storage or less slowly via external card reader/writer. GPSBabel has supported transfer of waypoints, routes, and tracks on that model under Linux for years. Given the low number of users, and particularly in the minor strains like kubuntu, I couldn't fake shock if it's decayed somewhat. The support on GPSBabel's part has been there for 10+ years. I <3 the way that an OSM user thinks he can appeal his opinion on how my software should work by putting "bugreports" on unrelated OSM pages. Classy.

You're welcome. Happy hunting!

60/76C model units have mass storage, but it's definitely an afterthought. (It was there on initial release.) Basically, it exposes the SD card as mass storage for tracks, custom POI tables, or files you want to carry around like a thumb drive. Reading or writing waypoints and routes is not supported. To transfer waypoints, you have to use a program like GPSBabel (and thus GSAK) that knows how to speak its proprietary Garmin USB protocol, which is basically their old serial protocol with a thin coat of USB paint. https://www.gpsbabel.org/htmldoc-1.4.4/fmt_garmin.html http://gpsfaqs.org/faqs/garmin/xseries/g60cx/waypoints.html#wptsonmem

Strong advice: forget about plugins. Since you're a premium member, you can order up a pocket query at https://www.geocaching.com/pocket/ A few minutes after you schedule it to run, there'll be a GPX or a ZIP file available to download. Plug your GPS into your computer and wait for it to show up as a USB disk drive. Copy the GPX (or the .gpx files after unzipping) to the geocaching folder on the GPS (I don't recall the exact path, but you can explore it just like you do a USB thumb drive) do a safe eject/unmount, and you're done. The various plugins are, IMO, more trouble than they're worth. The slowest part of the above is waiting for the GPS to boot while it ingests the new points.

GPSBabel will read gpx or loc and write upt. As a premium member, your GPX from pocket queries will contain more info than as a free member, but GPSBabel will convert whatever's in the source file format to Magellan's (largely forgotten) .upt format. Free for every OS, but donations accepted. Disclaimer: it's my creation.

Oregon 450 owner here. Honestly, buying that far "behind the curve" on Garmin products is a losing proposition. Compared to the 600's (also discontinued and also about $200 earlier this year for memorial day close-out) it's way slower, has a frustrating resistive touch screen that works exactly how any recent phone or tablet doesn't, doesn't rotate, doesn't support .ggz files, etc. Buying a 5 year old GPS is likely to frustrate you. Refurb 600's are $234-$250USD today (http://www.gpscity.com/garmin-oregon-600-newly-overhauled.html or http://www.cabelas.com/product/Garmin-reg-Oregon-reg/1570449.uts) and such - no endoresement of either vendor intended. They're certainly not flawless, but they're at least frustrating in a 2013 way instead of a 2010 way. Things like pinch-zoom actually work in a sane way. (The devices still crash all the time; they're still Garmins, after all...) If $200 is an absolute hard cap, looking for used devices is probably the win. Go with a model that accepts SD cards and load free maps from garmin.openstreetmap.nl. uSD cards are cheap compared to internal flash bumps and not paying Garmin for topo maps is a win when you can choose your own destiny on resolution vs. coverage.

This is one of many known crashes with Oregon 6xx family. http://garminoregon6xx.wikispaces.com/Common+Issues#x-Crash Reports My 600 crashes a few times a day when power caching.

NPAPI has been in the process of being turned down for several years. Any developer caught by surprise that NPAPI is going away is just not paying attention.

When iOS7 roamed the earth in substantial quantities, it's likely that the major apps supported it. The 3gs isn't exactly a hotbed of activity for developers. It's probable that few devs even have such devices/emulators to test with.

It's one of many issues in the Garmin lines that are well known to the user base, reported to their support department, and seemingly utterly ignored by QA/engineering. https://garminoregon6xx.wikispaces.com/Common+Issues#x-Crash Reports My Oregon 650 is the least stable Garmin device I've ever owned in modern times. The Oregon 450 used to crash only a few times a day instead of a few times an hour. That was about on par with the Colorado 400, so the 6xx experience really is much worse in my experience.

GeoTrekker26 is right - there's a lot of bad science here. Additionally, the placement guidelines https://www.geocaching.com/about/guidelines.aspx require you to "obtain the coordinates with a GPS device" - not guessing where a pin drops on a map or using a phone. Please place geocaches only using an actual working GPS. As a seeker, I generally dread caches placed in yards because even tens of feet of disagreement - which is common even with real GPSes - can mean you're digging in the wrong shrubs and get to explain geocaching to a homeowner while the police are on the way for suspicious shrubbery fondling.

I'm just going to leave this here: http://www.slashgear...arned-24298935/ ...and point out the poster's other video makes the same claim of the Note 5, which is refuted by a Note 5 owner with water damage.

As an Android developer, that's not totally accurate, Mineral2. NEW apps may not be developed/tested for it, but the apps that were on it won't suddenly disappear. This is the same as on the closed units. Android devs can decide they no longer care about older OSes and new versions just don't show up in Play and aren't sent update notices. There's some awkwardness about apps that touch other parts of the geocaching ecosystem (notably, Groundspeak API) and there's some potential that if, say, the API changed in an incompatible way that forced the app to update and the app had otherwise raised the floor from ICS, you could be hosed but that, too, is the same as the closed apps. When, for example, Groundspeak introduced Giga events, it's not like my Colorado magically got icons for it. Microsoft Word 3.0 continues to work on DOS 3.3, I'd assume...it's when you update only half of the OS/App couplings that you get into trouble. In practice, the changes since 4.0.4 are pretty minimal for a geocaching type app. Jelly Bean's animation framework makes for nice eye candy, but isn't difficult to avoid. Everything else in 4.0 is pretty well fleshed out for this type of app. It's not like, say, Gingerbread where supporting it is actual work. Supporting Monterra's screen resolution is the real problem for many apps not developed with such a low-res screen in mind. The Android sims make it possible to test layouts on such devices, but there's just an abnormally low number of dots for a "modern" Android device on Monterra.

I agree. This really belongs on Garmin's forum and not here, but it definitely doesn't belong here twice. Closing topic in favor of duplicate http://forums.Ground...0

Moderator note. I'm closing this at the OP's request as the question has been answered (defective cables exposed by a better performing USB implementation). But as a mod, I'll request that everyone involved in the grouchier posts in this thread please review the forum guidelines linked at the top of the group about treating everyone with respect. There were several posts here that ran afoul of that guideline. Play nice, please.

That's exactly the downfall of extensions: it depends on the reader of that GPX to cooperate with the writer via out-of-band contract. Garmin and Expertgps both have style extensions, IIRC, and they aren't compatible. GPSBabel reads Garmin's, but it's not like can convert it to ExpertGPS. I think we read enough of the color data that we can preserve it on a conversion to KML or Delorme's stuff, but it's well off the beaten path. https://github.com/gpsbabel/gpsbabel/blob/master/gpsbabel/gpx.cc

Use GPSBabel to convert your .loc to .gpx.