Entropy512

It depends on how critical to your needs aerial imagery is. In my opinion the ability to load aerial imagery does not make up for the fact that the PN-40: Has a smaller and lower resolution screen Despite the dual processor, smaller screen, and no relief shading (less work to do), has slower updating of the screen as you move. Does not provide you the option of adding international maps if you ever travel internationally Does not have third-party sources of free topographic data - Despite the fact that the source data is free in the United States from the Census Bureau and the USGS, DeLorme's topo maps are less detailed than ones freely available from www.gpsfiledepot.com - When I walked in my town park, the PN-40 showed the creek that runs through the park as an effectively straight line that eventually angled towards the river. Both of the New York topo maps available from the above site show its true structure (meandering frequently). Given that there's a cache in one of the peninsulas created by the meanders (which puts it on the other side of the line indicated by the 40), it helps a lot to have accurate hydro structure. Has quite a few known (and even acknowledged by the manufacturer) quality control problems. These may eventually get fixed, but right now the PN-40 is a quality control gamble. (translation: you get what you pay for) Cannot be powered in a vehicle using relatively common power supplies (Motorola, Blackberry, HTC, among others). In general, a lot of reports in the sticky thread documenting power supply issues indicate that the "one piece" cable that comes with the unit tends to cause lots of problems (lockups and such) if an attempt is made at using it to provide external power. You need to purchase a special cable to provide external power. Has no "bracket mount/rail mount" point - Only options are friction mount and lanyard mount. The PN-40 comes with an incredibly long lanyard that allows the device to swing about quite a bit. The Oregon's included carabiner mount is just plain slick - It does not permit very much side-to-side twisting motion, and in general the device doesn't bounce/swing much when clipped to a belt loop. (The Oregon has a lanyard mount too.) According to at least one review on Amazon, the NOAA marine charts provided by DeLorme are at a significantly lower resolution than the source data. Tonight I'll try to see if Topo 6 (since I had to return Topo 8 with my failed PN-40) is compatible with the Map Library (which I activated before my unit failed and I returned it) so I can see how DeLorme's aerial imagery for my area compares to the freely available source data for the area (USGS aerial, or in my case, New York GIS aerial which is what Google Maps and Google Earth users get for free at full resolution.)

Yup. The fact that the Garmin behaves as a bog-standard USB Mass Storage device is both a blessing and a curse. Con: It's possible to delete critical data (like the preloaded topo map) Pro: It's easy to back up critical data It's easy to update the maps If you have a backup, you can do funky tricks if for some reason you want to temporarily replace the onboard topo maps.

It sounds like you really only need two trips: One to get coordinates for the hide location and one to place it once you get the WP name, OR: One to place it and record coords and one to return and add the WP name to the container. Remember, there's going to be some expectation of maintenance, you can't "place and forget" a cache. (One reason I'm going to wait quite a while before my first hide - all the good hiding spots in my area already have caches. I could do an LPC or GRH, but I prefer to do something more interesting in a park or along a hiking trail.

Hmm... I really haven't tried to externally load a route to my Oregon yet, as I have City Navigator maps installed and so can do on-device routing. I know the US 100k topo maps don't do autorouting but I think the regional 24k ones do - Does Mapsource Topo GB do on-device autorouting? Maybe this is conflicting with your externally generated routes? Which profile setting are you using when doing this? The Automotive profile with default routing settings, the Geocaching profile with default routing settings, or something else (customized routing settings.) My suspicion is that it's either a bug in Mapsource or a conflict between the external route and the Oregon's onboard routing system. To a great degree, the Oregon has been designed to operate without special external software (all internal data is stored as GPX files), so in some cases Garmin's "legacy multi-device" tools perform worse on the Oregon than other approaches (e.g. Garmin Communicator is vastly inferior for loading geocaches to the device compared to simply saving a GPX directly from geocaching.com to the device's memory as a file.) In fact you may be able to lay out routes and paths in Google Earth, convert the KML to GPX with gpsbabel, and load it into your device. I'm working on doing this for some local trails, will let you know how that goes.

An Oregon with City Navigator Europe maps should be very close to what you want. In tems of dual use devices, the Oregon is the closest I've seen so far. For caching it's amazing, and for road routing one of the few thing it's missing is voice prompts. Widescreen landscape mode might be nice too, but I've gotten used to TomTom Navigator on an AT&T Tilt so i'm accustomed to portrait mode in the Oregon's approximate screen size.

*deleted dupe content* - Post apparently made it despite a PHP error.

Probably not as good as the Oregon's - the PN-40 would have to advance lightyears compared to the 20 and SAHH to come close, and to be honest, for POI searching and such in a vehicle, a touchscreen is a must. The only thing about its road routing features I miss compared to TomTom Navigator or Garmin Mobile XT (I've tried both, I prefer TT's UI slightly more, but Google Local Search in GMXT ROCKS!) is that TTN and GMXT do voice prompts - The Oregon's road routing has everything else I'm used to.

Garmin Oregon - You can load Garmin City Navigator maps to get road routing. Touchscreen interface is definately iPhone-inspired. Standard cables, standard memory interface. Loading caches from a Pocket Query is a matter of dragging and dropping the GPX file onto internal memory. The Garmin stores all internal data (waypoints, tracklogs) as GPX files, so you can access tracklogs just by copying them from internal memory. Pretty good receiver, although IMO the STM Cartesio is not as good as the old SiRF III, but better than the iPhone's GPS by all accounts I've read. Garmin issued a press release that they'll be going with the MTK2 chipset in new devices (not yet released) - the MTK2 chipset is incredible. A nuvi is sort of usable for geocaching but tends not to be very usable for the task due to on-road locking, static navigation, not being ruggedized, etc.

gpxspinner + plucker also works, that's how I used to go paperless

Oregon. As others have said, the wireless transfer is limited and a custom proprietary technology. (Garmin has been rapidly moving towards open standards, but this feature is one thing still not open. That said, it's a very rarely used feature.) Everything else about the Oregon (other than the map data format, but this is so far closed for every receiver in existence) is an open standard. The Oregon has a standard mini-USB connector, so if you lose or forget your cable on vacation it's easy to find a replacement. It uses the same "dumb charger" signaling convention as HTC does for their PDA phones. It doesn't use the same convention as Motorola/Blackberry unfortunately, but there's an easy settings workaround that allows these chargers to be used. Memory is MicroSD. Garmin officially only supports cards up to 4GB, but 8GB cards work fine. Garmin's stated limitation is probably because map files are limited to 4GB, unless you play funky file management tricks (renaming maps to switch between map sets stored on the card), anything above 4GB doesn't buy you much unless you're storing extra stuff on the MicroSD card not related to the Oregon's operation. To load caches into the Garmin, just drag and drop a GPX file onto the internal memory or MicroSD into \Garmin\GPX - The Garmin operates as a normal USB Mass Storage device. Tracklogs can be opened right into Google Earth from the internal memory if you connect the USB cable. There are free legal topo maps generated from public data available for most of the US at http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ If you want on-road autorouting you will need to purchase Garmin's City Navigator maps. While its on-road features will leave a Nuvi or TomTom user disappointed, its on-road routing capabilities blow away any other trail-oriented GPS I've ever used.

gpsbabel should also be able to "massload" waypoints into a GPS, although it won't do the trick that GSAK does with the macro. I should look into whether I can dupe the gpsbabel macro with some Perl. A friend is likely going to be purchasing an eTrex soon.

It's hard to tell from that picture whether it's the world basemap zoomed out or if it's the 400t's built-in topo.

Geniune Garmin car adapter or third-party? While I've had no problems with third-party adapters, you might be using one that doesn't supply enough juice and confuses the Garmin's power circuitry and/or is shorting a pin that Garmin adapters don't. I believe some Motorola car adapters short the USB data pins together as part of Motorola's method of signaling a dumb charger to the device, there's a possibility this might draw current from the Garmin.

Alkalines in general are a bad idea for any device. The one real advantage they had over NiMH batteries (low self discharge) has been negated by the new breed of Ultra Low Self Discharge (ULSD) NiMH batteries, also sold as "hybrid" or "Pre-Charged". A few packs of ULSD NiMH batteries and a good NiMH charger (such as MaHa MH-C9000 or LaCrosse BC-900) is one of the best investments anyone can make. I have yet to even have my Oregon show one bar down on the battery, but I'm in the habit of throwing things onto my MaHa on a regular basis (being a smart charger with proper charge termination, it can safely "top off" batteries) and the Oregon uses the same car power supply as my phone and as both my old Bluetooth GPS puck and my new BT GPS datalogger, so the end result is I've got power supplies all over the place for it. It sounds like the PN-40 may have had significant improvements in road mapping. Its handheld predecessors (PN-20, various revisions of Street Atlas Handheld) were not by any definition serviceable. Even a short (20-30 mile) road route took 2-3 minutes to generate on-device with SAHH, and the PN-20 wasn't much faster.

The folks at Groundspeak are not sinister - they actually quite friendly. Have you actually asked them what you need to do to become a trusted partner?? If you have to ask them, it is too undocumented and arbitrary. If you have to dig up a two-line forum post to even get confirmation of its existence, it is undocumented and arbitrary. As an example, say you're a talented Windows Mobile shareware/freeware developer with a couple of small but quite nice Windows Mobile apps under your belt, but you're not a megacorporation with a brand name and lots of revenue? You see the great features of the iPhone app and want to bring it to Windows Mobile. How, exactly, do you get API access? What's the process? How do you establish "trust"? What is the definition of "trusted partner"? None of this is documented. The answer is - Small fry like aforementioned WM developer get locked out of the game and references to their software get deleted on the forums. (I've seen references to a particular WM app on multiple threads here, but a search for that app's name as of today only gives results from a recent thread which was started on June 8 and first referenced the app in question on June 14.) It actually seems (from briefly playing with it) to be a quality app with a number of features not present in any other Windows Mobile app, but given Groundspeak's attitude towards said app I would not be surprised if the developer just gives up.

So the log has to be "interesting" or you will delete it? Sounds like an ALR to me. http://www.geocaching.com/about/guidelines...gingofallcaches

Does anyone know if gc.com's iPhone app will work on the Touch in an "offline mode"? (download caches in advance and view summaries, but no GPS). Not sure if there's a way to load a set of HTML pages to the iTouch for offline browsing. As my ex who just moved to Denver is interested in geocaching and owns and iTouch, this might be a good solution for her to go paperless with a basic Garmin (like an eTrex) if it can be done. I just downloaded the app to my touch last night. Yes it will work in an offline mode if you save the cache info in advance. I think I'm going to try to get my visor working so that I don't have to carry my touch into the field. What program should I be looking at for the visor? It uses the Palm OS. I used to use two programs: GPX Spinner (http://www.gpxspinner.com/) can take a GPX file and convert it into a set of static HTML pages on my hard drive Then I used Plucker to convert that package of HTML pages into a Plucker document, which I could read using Plucker on the PDA (Kyocera 6035 or Treo 600, I never cached with my 650 although the same solution should have worked). Unfortunately, based on the last update of their news page, Plucker appears somewhat dead. There may be similar packages available, or the latest version of Plucker should do the trick even though it hasn't had a release in a few years on a Visor.

Which is why I can accept if there were a publically documented method for becoming a registered developer (which there is not). It is understandable that in some cases an API is not universally available to the public, but as long as the criteria for gaining access to that API are clearly listed, it's OK. (albeit not even close to ideal compared to a publically available API - very often open source developers get left out of developer programs because the program's terms of service and the philosophy of open source are not compatible.) With access to the API even I could implement a feature like Cache Register's for Garmin Oregon/Colorado devices in a few hours with some Perl. Everything required but the Groundspeak API is publically documented and relatively simple.

Your blog is blocked from where I am now (anything not categorized the filters is blocked by default), but it sounds to me like this is describing a form of web scraper, which violates Groundspeak's TOU.

I like how you mock my words regarding the secret backdoor API and try to put the blame on Garmin for not having a given feature that requires access to undocumented Groundspeak features, when the only evidence of the existence of the API is features in some apps not possible without either violating Groundspeak's TOU or some sort of undocumented API. Until you can show me one of the following: 1) Public API documentation, or 2) At the very least, a official page describing Groundspeak's developer program, stating what features are available to registered developers and what specific criteria must be met to become a registered developer It's a secret undocumented API whose existence itself is undocumented. If there were an available API, it would be possible for someone to write "one app to rule them all" that provided this feature for any hardware with the capabilities and a documented interface for using those capabilities. (And the Garmin Oregon has such capabilities and they ARE documented). As examples - I'm thinking one of the best places to see this feature would be in GSAK (which supports a wide variety of GPS devices), or even better an open source application like gpsbabel.

The problem is not so much that the hardware isn't qualitatively good, it's that most pda phones are not designed to withstand the tough realities of field geocaching. Drops, rain, mud, dust, etc. I'd keep the pda in a protective case and get a used/cheap high sensitivity handheld for caching. I'd be inclined to disagree with this. They're not designed for it, but with proper care and a proper case (like the Boxwave Slim Rubberized Shell Case for the AT&T Tilt), they'll easily do the trick. My Tilt has survived a lot of drops and falls over the past year and a half. Meanwhile a "rugged" GPS unit I tried last week failed on its own or was killed by a very light tap (swinging 2-3 inches on the end of its lanyard as I unlocked my apartment door while it was hanging from my wrist.) Edit: As to the Palm Treo 650, due to the "stick up from the body" antenna, you could get a metal case with neoprene inserts for the Treo 600/650. That makes the thing nearly invincible except for dunking. Pretty sure the metal cases will kill reception on newer "built in antenna" units.

Just out of curiousity, was one of those finds in Ithaca a cache called "Star Girls"? There are only a handful of caches in Ithaca that were placed before 2003 and are still active and "Star Girls" is one of them (also Dogfish, Ithaca is Gorges, and Cachcadilla). From recent logs it looks like Star Girls could use some TLC and I may visit the cache soon to see what I can do. While I am there, and assuming the orginal logs are intact, I can take a look to see if your physical log is still there. The Cachcadilla cache is actually disabled right now. It's located along a trail in a gorge (about .5 from me) that is closed during the winter and the trail is *still* not open to the public as last winter did a lot of damage to the trail. I can't remember which ones. I know I attempted Cachecadilla a few times over the past years at varying periods of time and failed each time - GPS reception down there is awful! Great photo opportunities though. I was actually planning on doing a caching trip to Ithaca in the next few weeks as I live 45 minutes away. So the missed finds there aren't a huge deal as I can probably redo them (except for archived ones). The Utah caches are a different story - I won't be back out there any time soon.

Does anyone know if gc.com's iPhone app will work on the Touch in an "offline mode"? (download caches in advance and view summaries, but no GPS). Not sure if there's a way to load a set of HTML pages to the iTouch for offline browsing. As my ex who just moved to Denver is interested in geocaching and owns and iTouch, this might be a good solution for her to go paperless with a basic Garmin (like an eTrex) if it can be done.

That's your best bet. The only problem with all the PDA-based solutions is the lack of electronic compass. It's a really nice feature to have when closing in on the last 100 feet to a cache.

*double post delete* - GC forum database hiccuped