KRUZZIN 2

I have been away from geocaching for a couple of years and now I'm coming back. I used to use GSAK to load PQs from a PC. I am now on iMac and while I have Parallels using it is a nuisance. I've tried EasyGPS and it seems pretty simple to use if not as feature rich as GSAK. Anybody else using EasyGPS? If using iCache avoids Parallels and is as easy to use I would give it a try. TIA Paul

Thanks. I'm greatly relieved to know that it does that automatically and that my impatience was the problem

New to GC and have only used my 450 a couple of times. So far so good. Gets me to the caches. Appears to lose its mind every now and then but only briefly. My first time out I was using a downloaded PC I sent to 450 with GSAK. It had our home as centre point. Went to my daughters yesterday, about 30 miles away, and when I fired it up it gave me the same caches in the same order. Is there any way to program the unit to give me the caches in order of distance from where I am, like an iPhone? I realize its not a wireless device but it knows where I am. Its a bit of a pain if I have to do a new centre point and then send a new database to the 450. Thanks

child waypoints are things like parking coordinates, trailhead coordinates, etc. Pretty much the waypoints in the table after the long description. Parent waypoints is the waypoint listed at the top of the cache listing, i.e., the waypoint of the tradidtional, wp1 of a multi, etc. Thanks!

What are 'child' and 'parent' waypoints?

Yes, I found some sites that did have them for around the price that site lists. Well, I dont feel as bad about paying if it really is the only way. I can understand WHY maps can get pricey, I Know what goes into making them and getting them distributed. So I guess around $70 is way better then $99+. Thanks for the reply Have a good one Have you looked here http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ Topo map for southeastern US is free. Won't work with your unit?

With a lot of help from dfx got the maps and they're loaded! Now all I have to do is figure out how to use the 450 with the maps and cache info.

My GPSr just arrived and of course I'm eager to get out there hunting. I took the advice of many of you and bought the unit without maps so now I need them. Two questions: 1. For Canda the Ibycus maps have been recommended but, unfortunately, can no longer be downloaded from the creator's site and I've watched the YouTube tutorials on how to do it with BitTorrent. I'm only a little bit techy and would rather have a root canal than attempt that. I can always send Dale $25 for a CD but I'm in a hurry. Is it possible for somebody who has these maps to email them to me. It's likely a huge file but could be zipped? Does anybody know how much space they take up in the GPSr? It has 850MB of internal RAM. Would I need an SD card? 2. For the US can anybody point me to good, downloadable maps that don't require a graduate degree in computer science to get? Thanks for your help. This forum has been absolutely great. Cachers are obviously like squash players, a bit of a family. Cheers.

The 2610 doesn't take batteries and I'm not sure if you can get maps for it anymore. I have a 2610 and a 2820 and in their day they were twice the gps as the Nuvi line. The only thing I can say about my Nuvi 855 over the Street Pilots is it has a bigger and brighter screen. Are you sure it's not supported by Garmin's POI Downloader? My 340 is and a reply I got from Garmin said that the downloader supports "the StreetPilot" series. Having said that I think you would be able to load some pretty rudimentary information. I have no idea how much memory my 340 has. It would probably be a crummy unit for trying to hunt caches with anyway.

Granted, this is an in-store-only deal, but we're starting to see the price erosion begin. Another member just popped up with an early Black Friday $229 special on the Dakota 20 with maps included: http://cdn.black-friday.net/adscans/gander...ain-page-17.jpg and that level of discount indicates that Garmin may be making deals with retailers for the season again. I know this doesn't help in your area (Gander Mountain doesn't have stores quite that far north), but it gives a sense of where things may be headed in the next couple of weeks. Anxious to get going so ordered a Garmin Oregon 450 yesterday. Really appreciated all the helpful comments. Taking much advantage of Black Friday from London Ontario was going to be a long shot and when currency and duty and travel costs and bridge tolls all come into play I'm guessing major erosion of that advantage would happen. Anyway I'm happy to have made the decision and now the fun begins. Cheers.

Thanks for asking the question. I tried to make my Garmin StreetPilot work using instructions in the link supplied to use for the Nuvi and I succesfully installed GSAK and did a pocket query so at least my treads are deeper. Unfortunately the process doesn't support StreetPilot so I guess it's still a no go

The Dakota 20 at $230 is a nice deal. Too bad I'm in Canada and it's in-store only. I'll just hope they put it online too

I have no idea how old the technology is or where it fits in the chain. I was hoping I could use my Garmin StreetPilot 340 for cache hunting but there is no way to enter co-ordinates and it is strictly an automotive device that takes Garmin maps. If it hooks up with a USB cable maybe ask Garmin if it will acceot files from a pocket query or if there is another way to get waypoints in. Actually this has caused me to go and ask them the same question.

Good work my man!! I don't know how you did that but it told me everything I need to know. Thanks.

Gotcha. Mind you if I was a retailer in North America I wouldn't price match that flimsy looking operation. The site has a lot of the indications of a scam, complete with spelling errors and no way to get at them except your keyboard. There are a lot of unanswered questions for me. Where is the product coming from. Taxes, import duties. There is a lot of opportunity for hidden costs. I've written to them and if I don't get answers I'm comfortable with I'm going to buy from a Canada/US retailer I trust. Thanks for the suggestion. It would be worth a try.

if it was me, i'd try my hardest to get it PM'd somewhere locally Not Following - "PM'd"?

I'm looking. See my new topic in this forum about BestYonko.

I found an online retailer called BestYonko. They are advertising the Garmin Oregon 450 for $230 US. That's way better than anybody else. As a retired professional accountant who got involved with the occasional fraud investigation however, I am bothered by the lack of identification and the fact that they claim to want to be the biggest online distributer in the world and focus on the UK market, and they sell in US$, euros and pounds, but the only address I can find appears to be in New Jersey. Whenever a price seems to good to be true ..... Anybody ever heard of these guys or bought anything from them?

Still have one of each. Have tended to use the Oregon 450 more. I'm in an exceptionally "cache rich" part of the universe here, and even though I've found some 3200+, that leaves an extraordinary number still to find. Since I travel up and down the Front Range from home (in Longmont) down into Boulder, Denver and all of the many suburbs, and up towards Ft. Collins, the additional 3000 cache limit of the Oregon has turned out to be a real plus. If I'm headed down to S. Denver, and might catch a couple of caches while I'm in the area, I don't have to reload a PQ. For "caches of opportunity", the count counts. I was just missing too many opportunities. Whether your area presents similar problems should definitely be calculated into your decision. The screen on the Oregon 450 is indeed somewhat better than the Dakota 20, but both were entirely acceptable for caching. I wouldn't hesitate to use either. Both work well enough on my bicycle when there's all kinds of odd sun angles. That wasn't true with the Oregon 400 that I borrowed for one bike outing -- made me a real believer. The only place where the added resolution of the 450 over the Dakota 20 makes a significant difference to me is in the use of Birdseye (satellite) images. The Oregon 450 supports NMEA output - the Dakota 20 does not. I wanted to try my hand at running my netbook mapping using raw NMEA output, and the Dakota 20 wouldn't take me there. Neither would my old eTrex Summit HC, much as I loved its accuracy. Net reasons for the Dakota to Oregon upgrade: I could get the 450 for $250 on a special sale over Labor Day Weekend at REI. It gave me 2-1/2X the capacity in caches of the Dakota 20. The screen worked better for Birdseye. I could start experimenting with NMEA mapping. If I were in your shoes, I might wait just a couple of weeks to see what surprises come during the Black Friday sales, especially at places like REI. Thanks muchly for this. Being in Canada I've got to put 130 miles for the return trip on my car to physically enjoy Black Friday but it's a good suggestion for online shopping. Have you ever checked to see whether the online retailers discount the way the bricks and mortar stores do? I think we're going to do the cache hunting fairly casually and it sounds to me like the Dakota might be more than adequate for us. I must admit I was surprised to find that there are 5 caches hidden in the woods in our little gated golf community and over 100 in and around the city of London, Ontario. It was amazing to discover this whole culture all around us. Nevertheless, 1000 still sounds like a big number to me. Cheers.

Like the man said, "paperless", or what passes for it with the technology we've got. There are some tricks that can help to get additional cache information where you can get to it on the eTrex and mapXX series units, but it's nothing like having the native support of the newer units. There's certainly no way to enter cache notes on the 60CSx. I've owned the other style Garmins, and if you plan to do text entry, don't let anyone tell you that the touch screen isn't a whole lot faster. I still find it slower than I'd like, and it's light years faster than what I owned prior to my Dakota 20. While the 3-axis compass isn't a showstopper, it beats the heck out of the 2-axis if you use that feature for caching. The 60 series won't see any new firmware, while the Oregon 450/550 and other recent models are all still seeing feature upgrades. The 450 has cache type filtering, at least a little support for multi-caches, and some other geo-friendly features that are available only on the more recent models. No 60 series will ever support Chirp, if you think that technology (or Wherigo, for that matter) is going anywhere. The 450 does. As for maps - yes, a topo map will also show the roads, but they're not "routable" in that you can't say, "Take me from A to B via road" and get a result. There are also separate Open Street Map maps that allow for that, providing you can identify the start and end points on a map. OK, I think I've been convinced to get reasonably current technology. I'm down to the Oregon 450 and the Dakota 20. The price difference here is $90. Not a huge deal but you have used both of these units and I'm wondering what you like better about the Oregon. As a newbie it's hard to appreciate from comparing tech specs what they will mean for me that I would care about. Apparently the Oregon shows topo maps in 3D and the Dakota doesn't. What are the big differences for you? What attracted you to move on from the Dakota? It seems like one is as paperless as the other and you can load the same maps? I really appreciate your advice by the way.

Much appreciate the replies from you and ecanderson, who seem to be more or less on the same page. Just for clarity, what could I do with the Oregon 450 that I can't do with the Garmin GPSMAP 60Csx which is $140 less and seems to get mostly rave reviews. I didn't really lie when I said I wasn't that price sensitive but at the end of the day price is always a consideration when comparing products PS Another stupid question. What do topo maps show when you're searching for a cache in a village, for example? Are the streets shown so you can see how to get around? I'm sure it's a lame Q.

Much appreciate the replies from you and ecanderson, who seem to be more or less on the same page. Just for clarity, what could I do with the Oregon 450 that I can't do with the Garmin GPSMAP 60Csx which is $140 less and seems to get mostly rave reviews. I didn't really lie when I said I wasn't that price sensitive but at the end of the day price is always a consideration when comparing products

To get the help I'm looking for I think I need to tell the short story. Friends introduced us to geocaching last weekend and we are hooked. Found three caches. So proud. They had an iPhone 3 and I was pretty impressed with the technology. I am a bit confused about what he was doing however. He had printed a lot of cache information but when he tapped the geocaching.com icon all the caches around us appeared and when he tapped on one of them all the information he had printed appeared. What was the printing all about? By the way, if he wasn't away I'd ask him. I can tell you he has not paid to be a premium member. Moving on, while I liked the iPhone, and it certainly was quite adequate (we never really got under any serious tree canopy but going forward I know we would do that) and easy to use and appeared to offer paperless caching, it's a lot of money for things I don't need. It's not the purchase price (Can$159 when you commit to a 3 year plan) but the $67/month. I already have a Garmin Streetpilot for the car, which I like, and a cell phone and a digital camera and I don't need email in my hand now that I'm retired. What I want to do is recreate the experience I witnessed, except the printed stuff, with a dedicated GPS device. Can I do that? I want to hook up to geocaching.com and be able to do the unplanned stuff. I've been reading commentary and reviews of what appear to be very popular units, like the Garmin GPSMAP 60 Csr and some Delormes and others but I am not sure I'm understanding the technical implications of some of these choices. I am somewhat techy but I'm not interested in having to go through a two or three step process to get cache information into my device, which I'm guessing takes the whole unplanned adventure off the table. What do you suggest? I'm not all that price sensitive and reliability has a high value for me. If I had $300 to $350 invested when I'm equipped with whatever maps and so on I can live with that. "Maps" sort of leads me to a last question. If I'm not using the device for anything but looking for caches and we've achieved the appearance on the screen of everything around us, how much map do I really need? Might be a bit naive here but I'm not telling everybody where to find me (unless mentioning Canada narrows the search enough for you - ). Thanks for your help with this. I bought a premium membership already because I think the pocket queries sound like a good idea and I'd like to support the whole movement anyway. Cheers.