landcruising

I thought about this option, but since my 600 is an older one I was looking at buying a new battery($20), maps (3 at $60 ea = 180), etc. for something that was no longer going to be supported. Basically buying stuff for an old unit that if it died I would have $200 of useless stuff that would incline me to continue on the megellan road. I decided that my $200 would be better spent on a new garmin and free maps from the helpful people on this site. I am also finding that garmin is quickly becoming the microsoft of the 90's for gps units and megellan is becoming the apple of old. Good products but the majority of the world is leaning one way for a reason. megellan seems to be missing this reason.

Am I missing something here? Some of the replies actually want the gps to do all the work, (turn by turn driving directions, time to cache, distance, hints, pictures etc. all in one unit. Why not a teleporter to the sight or better yet if you read the log or look at a picture of it on gc.com you get to log it. Joking aside, I still bought a new etrex vista hcx to replace my explorist 600 so I could have new street maps and topo for hiking. (Oh and easier geocaching.) To me the fun of geocaching is still the trip there not the joy of logging as many finds as i can. The fun I have had is watching the kids excitment searching near by looking for the cache, the fun of going to a place I didn't know existed, trying to determine the best approach to a cache based on the physical location limitations(streams, roads, cliffs etc.) and the thrill of the hunt like looking for buried treasure. If my garmin told me exactly within inches, drove me there etc. I don't know if it would be as much fun. If we want finding to be easy why not just put a large cluster together, say 10,000 of them 5 feet apart, and see who's gps is better within inches of the finds and find them the fastest. Then again I guess the old timers can then say I remember 100' accuracy and manually inputing the points, and the really old timers could say I remember using a paper map to find something, and the ancient could say, I remeber when we made a map to where we were, etc you get the point. A bit off topic but worth consideration when considering the big picture for the use of a gps for geocaching. Why do you do it, to find more than anyone else as fast as you can or for the thrill of the journey? It is nice though not searching for hours with no luck. my 2 cents or 1 cent from someone elses point of view.

Former 600 user. I purchased one of the early 600 after starting geochaching with the 300 but never bothered to buy maps. I used it successfully for a few years. One thing I did notice was that I was consistently off on caches by 8-10 feet to the north were my friends with Garmins were within 1-2 feet. I got used to it and was successfully making finds. No real problems with the 600 until recently. Just purchased a Garmin vista HCX after a friend bought the 60csx and I saw how useful street and top could be while hiking caching and fishing. So far so good. The 600 will be for sale soon or kept as a backup since finding new maps seems very hard.

My 600 does not appear on screen either but charged ok. Either way I just ended up buying a garmin vista hcx for $200 new and downloaded some free maps from members here, since there does not apear to be much map support anymore for the explorist and the chaeapest old sourses I could find were $50 for old info.