tossedsalad

I have a dead Merigold that has a bad screen. I might be able to use this for the parts. Is your friend intersting in selling it? PM me.

I find it interesting to see the various responses to the thought that Garmin will stop offering a second license to use their map software. They can be summarized like this... 1) I'm mad as hell and I am going to threaten to switch when I upgrade my unit in a few years. 2) I don't like it, but my Garmin is by best friend. I can't give up my best friend, can I? 3) I already used both of my licenses, what do I care? 4) Let's see... where did I file that web page on software cracks? 5) Open source is the answer! What was the question again??? Personally, I find #5 the most interesting. My GPSr died a couple of weeks ago and I am in the process of putting together a GPS setup consisting of a bluetooth GPSr, a Zire 72 and I may need to write some software. I most likely will start with whatever open source I can find and add to it. Open source GPSr software has the potential of generating a whole new paradigm for GPS usage. One of the things that it may do is allow for the creation of an open source database of roads, trails and waterways that is based on measurements taken by GPS users. So how many are actually interested in this? Why wait for Garmin or Magellan to tick you off? I find the idea of being able to tailor my GPS user interface and functionality to be irresistable.

I would recommend that you pick a used unit. You can get them for about half price and they are typically in very good shape. If you want small, the eTrex from Garmin or the Explorist from Megellan or the iFinder GO from Lowrance are all lightweight units. I seem to recall that the iFinder GO is particularly thrify on batteries. They all can be well under $200, are rugged and can mark coordinates. The iFinder GO can be had on eBay for under $60... buy two in case you lose one! I use a Meridian Gold... or I used to until the display died last week. Now I am looking at a PDA for GPS use, not what I would recommend for hiking.

I thought WAAS ground based and not from satellites. I didnt know i could even turn off WAAS on my unit. Geostationary satellites are some 22,000 miles above the equator. The radius of the earth is less than 4000 miles. At 40 degrees latitude the satellites will still be 41 degrees above the horizon. I am at 39.4 degrees in Maryland and I have have pretty much no trouble receiving WAAS satellites unless I am behind a hill. In fact, I usually receive *both* WAAS satellites! I don't think you will see a bar for a WAAS satellite. I just got a bluetooth GPS receiver and have been playing with the software to show the data. This has been educational regarding the meaning of the skymap and signal bars. They all coorespond to data that is calculated by the GPS engine and typically reported in NMEA sentences. The GSA command reports the active satellites, meaning used in the GPS calculations. The GSV command reports the location of all viewable satellites relative to the receiver and their signal strength. The displays on the tools I am using show the signal strength bars with heights according to the data reported by the GSV command. The skymap shows the location of each statellite as reported by the GSV. They typically color the bars and the satellite points to indicate which satellites are used in the position calculations as indicated by the GSA command. My merigold would not show a WAAS satellite with a signal strength bar, I assume because that is not reported in either of these commands. It would show them at fixed positions once they were being received. The WAAS satellites also would be colored or not which I assume indicates if they were being used to improve the position accuracy. But the two displays did not always match on the merigold. Some satellites would be colored on one and not the other part of the display. I am not sure why that was and when I asked Megellan about it one time I never got a satisfactory explanation. BTW, WAAS is based on measurements made using accurately located ground stations. An offset between the actual location and the calculated location is determined. This differential information is sent up to the WAAS satellites to be picked up by WAAS capable receivers to improve the accuracy of the calculations.

It seems to me that it would be a bit tricky to get the shield cut to fit your screen. I take it that that part will depend on your personal skills with scissors or similar.

I have searched until I am blue in the face and I can not find a way to enable the WAAS capability on my new Holux GPSlim 240. I have run the GPS Viewer program that came with the unit and it seems to put out a command $PSRF108,01*. I don't see the checksum sent if any. It doesn't seem to work. I don't see any indication in the utility that WAAS is enabled and when I receive the NMEA output commands using Hyperterm the GGA command reports a 1 for Position Fix Indicator which seems to mean WAAS is not being used. When I Googled I found a command $PSRF151 which does not work (it seems to be a GlobalSat command) and I found info on the SiRF binary command set. But I can't get the unit into binary mode. I would expect the output commands from the GPS to stop when I send a binary command, right? I found an older post by a SiRF representative (about the GPSlim 236) who clearly said there were no NMEA commands provided by SiRF to control WAAS other than binary. I can't get any commands to work, even controlling the output commands using the PSRF103 command. This unit is bluetooth. Is there something special that needs to be done to transmit to a bluetooth device? I am using the IVT BlueSoleil software for a generic bluetooth USB dongle on a desktop and Hyperterm. I am calculating the checksums correctly, I believe, but there seems to be a lot of bad NMEA command examples out there so it can be hard to verify. Here are commands I have sent including the checksum... $PSRF103,00,00,00,01*24 $PSRF151,01*0F $PSRF108,01*03 When a command is received by the GPSr, should it reply with anything to indicate the command was executed? What command should turn on WAAS in the Holux 240?

Actually, I have spent nearly $200 on this setup so far and I think I am going to wait to get a case. I may try to homebrew something using foam and a ziplock bag or maybe a lock&lock container. Basically the case they are selling is a watertight case with a screen saver in front of the touch screen. I should be able to make that for the short term. I got my Bluetooth receiver today along with the various dongles I bought to test it on the PC with. It seems to work, but I can't give it much of a test. If I take it outside at all, the bluetooth just does not seem to maintain a connection with my desktop. So I can't even get a signal from out side of the normal wandering of the coordinates. So I will have to wait until next week when I get the Zire 72 before I can really test this setup. I still don't really know what I will use for software. Possibly Mapopolis if the info I found is accurate.

You might want to try the iFinder GO. It is the lowest cost unit around. The down side is that it has minimal features (could be a plus for a beginner) and a small screen (none of the handhelds have "large" screens). If you use it for awhile and decide you want something better, it is easy to sell on eBay. But don't try to buy it on eBay, I am trying to get one there... In other words, it is a good starter unit. :^)

About the cheapest that does the job the OP wants to do is going to be a Garmin Venture Cx. The Venture Cx may offer directions for the car, but it has a very tiny screen and will be exceedingly hard to use for this purpose. My experience has been that the car GPS units and handheld GPS units are enough different that they are seldom combined. However, the price of the Cx seems to be only a little higher than other handheld units without the car directions, so what the heck!

Well that is certainly encouraging and if everything goes smoothly and in a timely fashion then I will certainly post a positive experience here. I find it interesting that egami seems to be a staunch supporter of crazy william in spite of all the evidence showing they are *not* a reputable dealer. Sure, they may have had unexpected problems with servers around the holidays and they may have gotten a bum rap or two, but the fact remains that the overall experience of a huge number of customers has been overwhelmingly negative. Sure, egami may have had only positive experiences with these guys. My experience has shown that you should consider as much more important, how a retailer responds when there *is* a problem rather the mere fact that you placed an order with no problem. If you buy enough things online eventually you will have a problem. With the track record of crazy william showing that he is unresponsive and unwilling to fix any problems, why would you consider ordering from him? If you order from this guy repeatedly, the info shows that evenuatally it will be a problem. I did some checking and I did not even find where his prices were the lowest. The units I checked were all a bit higher than the lowest seller on bizrate. I also looked them up on www.resellerratings.com and he has an very negative rating there as well with the most recent less than a month ago. As a comparison check out www.newegg.com. People can't say enough good things about newegg, so the reviews are not exclusive to complainers. So why take a risk with a company like this when there are others out there with lower prices and/or better reputations?

I checked with Otterbox and found that they *do* sell replacement screens in a three pack along with several of the seals for the box, all for $13, IIRC. The basic unit does not come with any extra screens. Pocket Solutions seems to be selling the Otterbox products at the same price. I'm not sure why I would buy from them rather than from Otterbox directly. But I have time to ruminate on this since my units won't be here until next week. Thanks for all the info!

My Merigold passed on and I decided to go the full PDA route with a Zire 72 and a bluetooth GPSr. The Zire 72 has a full color screen at 320x320 resolution and so should be one of the most viewable PDAs you can get. Some of the lower end units are color, but still 160x 160 resolution. I have not received my units yet, but I am looking forward to using them and learning about the software available. BTW, there seems to be a wider selection of software around for the WinCE based units compared to the Palms. I guess they have not been able to defend against the onslaught from cell phones and WinCE/mobile has been taking over the scene. So you might want to look at some of the non-Palm PDAs. If you really want a viewable display, I recently learned about a Nokia PDA/tablet with a rather generous screen of 800x480 resolution and over 4" diagonal. It is about the same size as my Merigold GPS and includes bluetooth as well as WiFi. I think it was designed to be the uber-phone with video and other high end features, but without the actual phone! The 770 has been replaced by the 800 and so the earlier model comes with some significant discounts. Add a bluetooth GPSr and you need nothing else to cache except a car charger!

Maybe I don't understand the problem. I click the decrypt button first and then I print to a PDF file. It always comes out just as I see it on the page. How are you printing to a PDF file? BTW, I had trouble understanding what you said since you didn't use punctuation. I'm not sure if you tried this or what exactly you are saying.

Thanks for the pointer. I had not found this company and their products appear to be good and at a decent price. They don't even try to rip off on shipping like so many eBay sellers do. They have a waterproof case for the Zire 72 I bought. Is the plastic screen replaceable? I would think this would get scratched up with use and needs to be replaced from time to time. Also, can these cases be used with car mounts? They offer a powered car mount, but they don't say if the waterproof case can be used with it. In fact, they don't realy say it is even powered, they just show various cords coming from it. How do you use your PDA in its case?

I far as I can see, the maps that come with Garmin, TomTom and Megellan are maps of standard roads. By paying more you can get topo maps that are 1:100.000 these can be National Geographic, Garmin or Megellan. For laptops/PCs you can get Delorme maps. But to get 1:24,000 maps is with USGS maps used by BackCountry Navigator (Pocket PCs and PDAs only), plus you get black and white aerial downloads. There are some very expensive solutions sold primarily to geologists that have 1:24,000 maps. The BackCountry Navigator maps are downloaded via a link and take up a lot of memory; I use a 4 GB ECC x150 SD chip. While the 1:24,000 maps are old, typically 1983 or earlier and there maybe changes in the civilized areas (roads and buildings), the topographical lines are great for the backcountry traveler/hiker. I like the USGS maps and wish they were updated. USGS PLEASE UPDATE! praying now. My Merigold that just broke uses MapSend Topo which had good data for geocaching, but it was also not up to date. The area where I live has been growing like a weed for the last 10 years or even more. So it is not unusual to find entire neighborhoods that are not on the maps. The USGS maps are more out of date than my Megellan maps, but I'm not sure just how much. I use USAPhotoMaps on the PC and it uses "U.S.Geological Survey aerial photos / topos from http://terraserver-usa.com/". The topo data for my area was gathered in 1993 and the photo data was gathered in 1988. So I agree, it is time to update the data. I know that higher resolution photos are available, but only for certain urban centers at the time. I expect the coverage to expand with time, but they have increased the resolution from 1 m/pixel to 0.25 m/pixel, 16X more data! I don't know if they can collect that very fast or not. Since you bring up the USGS maps, can you help me understand what I should see in these maps. I assume 1:24,000 means one inch on the map is 24,000 inches which is 0.395 miles, correct? But the USAPM maps are expressed in m/pixel. The mi/inch depends on the pixels/inch that your monitor shows. On my 17" monitor, 1280 x 1024 resolution, shows about 0.23 mi to an inch for the 4 m/pixel map data. Any idea what map scale these maps would be from? Is this likely to be the 1:24,000 map data? The next higher resolution available is 64 m/pixel or 8x less resolution. If the next size out from USGS is 1:100,000, then that would be 4:1 relative to the 1:24,000 maps and that ratio does not match the two resolutions that terraserver provides for the topo maps. I am very confused about the map data I am looking at in relation to the maps everyone else talks about. Can anyone help explain this?

Hmmm... thanks for the Confucian insight, but can you tell us if GC has a specific policy regarding caches in or near cemetaries? I read your other post saying what *you* would do in this case and we know what the other reviewer did. But shouldn't GC have a specific policy in this regards? In fact, shouldn't this be explicitly stated in the guidelines page? I find that reviewers have a great deal of discretion in approving caches and many decisions appear to be arbitary. Isn't it in everyone's best interest if the "guidelines" are made clear *before* a cache is placed?

The Yahoo group is a good idea, but I already tried that. Of course it has only been a day. We'll see if any late readers reply. I have sent Magellan two requests for the cost of repair, but they don't seem to be able to handle that from the web page form. I guess I'll have to call them. One nice thing about paying for a repair is that my unit has had one flakey feature that others say they don't see. When you press a button you hear a beep to acknowledge that the button press was activated. But it does not always result in the action being taken! In fact, when I hold the power button on to power it up, I can get the beep and let go of the button. But if I do it too quickly (even after hearing the beep) it won't come on! How the heck did it beep if it is not yet on??? I also messed up the overmolding by repeatedly wedging it into my cup holder instead of buying a mount. Maybe they will repair all of this, but even then it is still a toss up as I can buy one on eBay for around $100 and likely get a third serial cable... or I can sell my MapSend and two serial cables and maybe even get a few bucks for the old unit. I even cleaned the battery to board contacts while I had it open... :^) But this may all be moot. I just won an auction for a Zire 72 at a very good price and am looking for a BT GPSr to go with it. The Holux 240 is really tiny, about the size of your (my) thumb. I expect I can secure the GPSr to my hat brim and not even know it is there. I will need to get some software for the Palm still. There are a few commercial programs, but no freeware that seems to do much more than provide a compass and the satellite info. I am talking to the author of USAPhotoMaps about porting that program to the Palm. He seems to think it would be a pretty big job. But I am not sure it will be that tough. We'll see... This would be a great way to cache, not only paperless, but just one unit to hold in your hand.

That is exactly what I would like, a state for the cache where it is approved, but not published so that the owner can control the timing for it to be visible. Why? I also have issues with doing all the work of a cache and then having trouble getting it approved. Is it because I don't understand the guidlines? No, but I have found that the guidelines are interpreted differently depending on many factors. One thing I don't get is why anyone thinks there are issues with changes to the cache page. Any changes get flagged to the reviewer regardless of the state of the cache. I have made small adjustments to the coordinate after a cache was placed. It was not "gaming" the system, it was just a more accurate reading. My understanding is that this goes to the reviewer. A change before a cache was made public would not be any different. I don't know if a change to the process is required though. If I have a cache that I have questions about, I will put info on a new cache page and ask for it to be pre-reviewed before I put a lot of effort into it. I also point out *exactly* what I want reviewed. One big one is location. There are a *huge* number of subscriber only caches in this area that I can't know anything about. I can check my location against the listed coordinates by doing a location based search. But this won't tell me squat about the real locations of puzzle or multi caches. So I always get pre-approval on cache locations in this area... or I just post them somewhere else ;^) If you want to change any proceedures, I would change the procedures the reviewers use to evaluate a cache. I just placed a cache and got a lot of heartburn because the reviewer kept asking me the same question about the location. I didn't understand what they really wanted and kept referring them to the waypoint coordinates thinking they didn't know I had posted them. Turns out I was being asked if the cache was near a government building! How about if we add a checklist to the cache page about all the individual issues the reviewers have to check. I could have easily checked NO on "Within xxx feet of a goverment building". No on "within xxx feet of railroad tracks", etc. Then the reviewer will know you were aware of these issues and can only be concerned if there is some reason to believe you were mistaken. I don't really know how to interpret near as in "Caches near, on or under public structures...".

My Merigold has stopped working and it would seem the cause is a bad LCD. The screen has multiple lines on it and turns blue when I turn the unit on. I thought I could replace the LCD like you can on a PDA or laptop, but I can't find anyone who sells them. Anyone know of a source of GPS LCD screens?

The problem is not with the GPS unit, it is with the software. What software are you using? Just as another data point you could try it using USAPhotoMaps. This is free software that will communicate with any GPS using NMEA protocol over a serial port. I don't have a USB serial interface, so I can't say what works and what doesn't in your case. You could also try using hyperterm which is part of windows. Put your GPS in NMEA mode where it spews your position once a second and see if hyperterm displays the data. You will have to set up the serial port to match your GPSr settings. But I expect the real issue is that your software won't work with the "virtual" serial port of a USB adapter. You can try contacting the company that made the software and see if they have an upgrade, possibly even free!

Opps, double post...

I saw the Magellan eXplorist XL announced over a year ago. But the Magellan web site says, "National Backorder Pre-Order for Late May Delivery". Is this just coming out or is it in such demand that they can't keep it in stock? Or was there a problem with them and they had to stop production? Anyone know if the XL will work with MapSend version 3?

Garmin Venture CX is color, with expandible memory and is only about $180. Actually this seems like a decent unit. But it woudl cost me something more like $300 after I bought a new SD card (the CX uses a micro SD), the cables and the software. None of my existing stuff is compatible. I guess I could sell my cables and software on eBay, but that would only bring me some $50. Better would be to replace the LCD myself, but I can't find one anywhere. Places sell LCDs for PDAs and cell phones, but I guess GPS units are not used nearly as much. :^( Oh, I almost forgot, the only store I found that sells it for $180 is buy.com. They have a horrible rating at resellerratings.com, so I would not buy from them unless I was pretty desparate. Although Walmart has it for only $187. When I was at the local Walmart yesterday, they had a unit which I think was a Garmin 72 for $152. I am having trouble finding info on that. Walmart doesn't even list it. The store unit was the demo unit and had *nothing* with it, so I don't know if this was a good price or not. Then I called them to verify the model number and I was told by the sports manager that the demo model was not for sale! They don't know when or if they will get any more in and they don't have any flexibility in lowering the price. I found this all very confusing and doubt that I will go back to the local store again. I hate to say things like this, but they have always seemed like a bunch of 1D10Ts.

Garmin Venture CX is color, with expandible memory and is only about $180. Actually this seems like a decent unit. But it woudl cost me something more like $300 after I bought a new SD card (the CX uses a micro SD), the cables and the software. None of my existing stuff is compatible. I guess I could sell my cables and software on eBay, but that would only bring me some $50. Better would be to replace the LCD myself, but I can't find one anywhere. Places sell LCDs for PDAs and cell phones, but I guess GPS units are not used nearly as much. :^(

You requested opinions. I hope you noticed the smiley in my post... Yes, I did ask for opinions, but what I really am looking for is some insight into the issue that I have not seen myself. I went to the local stores today and they really don't have much. The only store that actually had anything in stock was Best Buy and they only had very low end units for list prices. I may take a crack at some Merigolds on eBay. The minimum price there has been about $80 which I am willing to pay. I am also going to look for a replacement display. I remember seeing them for PDAs. I expect you can get one for a GPSr too. Now where did I save that bookmark?