Katetrex

Onieda's ring GC43FD located on the UNF campus in Jax needs a new owner. Contact me to arrange transfer

I have a Sony Clie SL-10, opted for the black and white display, because I was told it was easier to see in bright sun. I also wanted to be able to replace the batteries in the field, sometimes I just can't find those outlets out there in the woods to plug in a cradle. I also have a memory stick with 128 mg of storage space. I paid $60 for it at circuit city floor demo unit. I liked it so much I wanted until I could buy the next floor model and got one for my mother at the same price, now we can beam info back and forth between the two. It also fits nicely in the back pocket of my jeans. Easy USB hook up to download cache pages and real user-friendly graffitti allows easy entry in the field of answers for virtuals.

I was told today, I had truly entered the world of "Geekdom" permanently by buying an xm radio.

PA has a great site, they haven't added coordinates yet but I am sure that's coming. http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/bah/DOH/hmp.asp?secid=31

An XM radio for the car was high on my list but then I decided I couldn't wait and played Santa to myself a little early and bought a Roady. Now, I find it hard to get out of the car. This is almost as much fun as when I got my first car. It puts a whole new face on driving. You find yourself driving and driving just to listen. I am surprised it is not on more lists.

I experienced a similar "failure". I thought the unit had failed but what had transpired was that the contrast or bright had mysteriously been changed so that the screen looked blank. When I got home I tried changing the batteries. As I sat down to give it one last look before sending it back to Garmin, I decided I could see a faint image. I changed the settings for the brightness and contrast and the display was fine.

I have a Clie SL-20 and am VERY happy. I can change batteries in the field. This has proven to be very handy when I am on the road and away from anywhere I could plug in a cradle to recharge. The B&W screen is easy to read in bright sun at the beach. I bought it for $90 and with the $30 rebate it was $60. In fact, I bought two and gave one to a family member. The IR feature allows me to beam files from one to the other. I bought a memory stick to back up my data. This was a lifesaver when I put my batteries in backwards (don't ask) and lost all my data. I just inserted the memory card and loaded in all back in less than a minute.

Try one of those polishing kits for CD's. They work fairly well on CD's and I imagine they would do the same for the screen without too much chance of damaging it. If it doesn't work, save it for your CD's and try something of greater strength. Those kits work great on data or music CD's.

What about using the TRACK BACK feature, even the lowly yellow etrex can do this. I think as a 911 operator or rescuer I would have tried to get him to use this to get back to his car, rather than waste all those taxpayer dollars "rescuing" him.

I would like to be able to have a pocket query that returns a list of archived caches in my area (radius of a zipcode). Would anyone else find this helpful?

I prefer the batteries to be on the front, so I can lay down in the tent to read without having a battery pack etched into my skull.

You must have missed the Founders Geocache in the French Quarter http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=42467&log=y&decrypt= The cache hiders gps read -12 below sea level at the cache site, as did my little yellow etrex and many others. My lowest reading to date has been -40 ft in downtwon St. Mary's, GA.

RBDupuy set out the original King Cake Baby cache in New Orleans in March 2002. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=16789 After re-reading all the logs, I wondered how many new caches have been set because of his inspired idea to place this cache. I picked up one of his babies in January 2003. I haven't had a chance to create a new cache as he requests, but hope to soon, something worthy of this royal lineage. If you have created a King Cake Baby spinoff cache, or know of one -- share its name and location and give us a link to its cache page.

I do.

The way I understand it is... the gps calculates your distance based on the map projection you are using, in this case the one for WGS84. The GPS is a sort of spherical virtual map. It is calculting your distance based on the map projection formula for the distances between lines of lattitude and longitude, to give you a distance measurement to a projected point. However, Flat maps do not calculate distances over changes in elevation, a gps does not either. The gps calculates the flat map distance based on latitude longitude, not all the hills you traverse up and down in between. On a topomap, you can measure distance across the map using the map scale but then you need to add in the feet as shown by the elevation lines to get a true idea of distance to be traveled.

was in a local park, and the cahce was hidden in an area with heavy forestation. I hadn't processed the concept yet that it might take a little longer for the gps to get a good satellite fix as I walked around. I walked back and forth and all over and seemed to be going no where. I fianlly sat on a bench and decided to study my surroundings closely to see if I could find the trees ferred to in the hint. I sat and pondered the landscape and saw nothing that looked like the trees in the hint. It was getting dark so I decided to go and come back another day and try again. When I stood up and turned around the trees described had been right behind me. On a local multiple, I failed to realize I had missed some coordinates and spent hours looking in the wrong place on two occaisions(strike palm to forehead and exclaim "duh!"). I later met some other cachers who were doing the same thing . Be patient, stop and smell the roses and think "where would I have hidden it?" Check the forums in a few days and see if anyone else has found it.

I reco carrying a large hiking stick and some pepper spray. Alligators are uncharacteristically aggressive in the Spring and early summer, during mating and nesting season. They become very territorial, expand their normal territories and will come after you! It is too early and too cold for this to be an issue, yet. I think the most common snakes we have are Coral snakes (red touches yellow-kill a fella=Coral Snake, red touches black-friend of Jack=King Snake), Rattlesnakes, and Water Mocassins. Fortunately, I have not come across any of these as yet out caching, nor I have seen any alligators caching. I have seen lots of nonvenomous snakes, generally lying on paths in sunny spots to soak up some heat. I do see lots of gators when kayaking but know of only two instances where they were aggressive. In Orlando a gator attacked a kayak to get the fisherman's fish that were on a stringer hanging in the water. Second was near Ocala during nesting season where they gator head-bashed a kayak and cracked it. The kayaker did not hang around to see what other action this reptile would take. My main fear is wild hogs and snakes, I try to make noise and don't reach under any bushes without pushing the flora aside with a stick.

I have a Clio SL10 and was using Mobipocket but found the query function to be cumbersome and frustrating. I tried Geoclipping (see link above)and it was far superior in accessing a particular page and reading it, but clipping each page certainly is a pia. I'll stick with Geoclipping for awhile, I like the idea that it doesn't involve downloading and setting up any special software on my PDA.

This cacher has reused this same cache page three times for three different caches. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=8656 At its first revision he left the old logs and it didn't effect any of the finders' find counts. This time he revised it and deleted all the old logs. As a result, everyone who logged this find no longer has it as one of their found caches and it doesn't appear in their count. Does anyone else find this objectionable? What harm would it have done to leave the old logs? Why should he need to continually revise this same cache page? Why not archive it and create a new page for the new cache? I am not real competitive about cache finds counts, but I do like to look back and be able to see a reminder of where I've been. I am getting to the point where my memory is not as good as it used to be.

I got a Sony Clie SL-10 for Christmas but have not been impressed by the pocket queries when used with Mobipocket viewer. There isn't anyway to change the sort order or delete pages once the query is loaded into the mobipocket viewer. I find it hard to search and view the pages with any precision. I am still new at this and haven't perfected my technique but on the whole, it has been frustrating and unsuccessful. I think I will still carry paper pages but use the appendix and logs feature of the electronic storage as a back up. I do have the decrypt program loaded and find this very useful!

I created a local park map of an orienteering course using ExpertGPs and altered the exported maps using Paintbox. We saved each checkpoint as a waypoint, highlighted them all and dragged them into the track and route windows in expertgps to create a trail on the map. Then we exported the map to a bmp file. It was very easy and quick. We added the bearings and distances to the exported map that were generated by using paintbox. You could also add the buildings and other features too. You can then paste the bmp file created in paintbox into a word processing document to add explanatory text or easily change the picture size. We used a basic yellow etrex.

I used to use Topozone.com before I got the ExpertGPS software. I used to print the maps and then locate and mark specific waypoints from the online maps onto my paper maps and then enter the coordinates into my gps. I used it for kayak trips, so we could decide where on the river we were at any given time. I found this to be quite accurate. I just had to remember to change my gps data type to NAD27(or whatever) to match the online maps. The advantages to using Expertgps are that it gives me distances between waypoints and I can download the waypoints into the gps with greater speed and I don't have to change from WGS-84 to something else to match the map. Using this software I can also just click on the map and it automatically saves the waypoint from the map to the waypoint list page from which I download. I can just bring up a map, click on it to create a route with waypoints and there it is, already to go for downloading to the gps and printing to a hard copy. It certainly made my life easier, I figure it was my best purchase of 2002 ($60).

From other posts in this forum and from information provided from a number kayak boards, forums,and a listserv, a number of gps units have not passed the dunking or even the splash tests. Many believe that use of the gps overtime compromises the seal of the screen and in the case of the Garmins, the rubber strip around the side. The most common complaints I remember are that the screen becomes fogged or the unit quits working all together (even after the battery compartment is dried out). Note that the battery compartments are not considered waterproof by the manufacturers. While Garmin has replaced these units promptly and with no hassle, it didn't do the users any good when they failed out in the wilderness. I use my gps on the water almost all the time, but I use a Voyaguer bag for cell phones. It keeps the unit dry and I can still see and operate it while it is in the bag. I paid less than $20 for it and feel it is worth it to add more insurance that the unit will work when I need it.

I regularly download tracks and routes to my computer from the etrex and overlay them on maps and sometimes just for fun the aerial photo option. In all cases, I have found the etrex info to be very accurate matches to the maps. Yes, you do have to give the unit time to catch up to its exact position. This is delayed sometimes by obstacles to clear satellite signals or being turned off in one location and turned on miles away.

Right after I posted this message, I checked the vendor webpage and there was the answer to my question - sorry folks. I downloaded the beta version and it fixed my problem.