ethanSLC

I have wondered about this myself. I have a Foretrex 101 (a "wrist-top" model) and sometimes the max speed seems to be odd, like 10 mph when I have just been walking. I always attributed this to some rapid arm movement.

That must be it! I never got around to changing the oil in it! In all seriousness though, I do ASIC and FPGA design for a living so I have a pretty good idea what goes on inside modern electronics. I have worked on projects with mechanical relays on the PCB, but they make more of a clicking sound. I have never quite heard anything like this, although I would suspect it's some sort of resonance in the power supply section. In any case, it's never given me a moments trouble, and it's built like a rock. Except for being heavy and a bit slow with acquisition I think the 12 could compete favorable with many more modern units.

Garmin GPS12 for me. I remember slowing saving my allowance so that I could pick it up. It still works great and I sometimes will use it as a secondary unit when caching with a big group. One thing I have always found strange is that it makes a noise, kind of a like a quiet grinding noise. It seems loudest when its first turned on and acquiring satellites. I can't imagine there is anything mechanical happening in there, anyone else with the 12 notice this?

If you want something a little more rugged and powerful you might want to check out the Icom F21GM (Link). These are "commercial grade" radios with 4 watts of transmit power. They also have removable antennas which allow you to hook up mag mounts for use in the car. Overall a pretty high quality radio for the price. Any hand held radio, and UHF especially (which includes both FRS and GMRS), will have trouble in heavy foliage. You might have better luck with VHF radios. I am not sure what licenses are available in that area of the spectrum besides ham, but it might be worth looking into.

I am wondering the same thing. I picked up a TB from a cache today, but the last log update was someone grabbing it on the 15th from a different cache. Maybe they just barely placed it, so I guess I will wait for a few days to see if the log gets updated. We are going to be able to take this TB to its goal so I am excited!

I quite like the Foretrex 101 on my mountain bike. No SiRFstarIII or mapping unfortunately, but perfect for speed and ride length data. And downloading waypoints is easy enough as long as you have a serial port.

I am running GSAK 7.1.0.67 under Windows Vista Business and it seems to work great.

I recently acquired one of these as well. I also had a little bit of a tricky time making the mount fit with the included rubber shims, but after much fiddling finally got it to work. The mount does seem pretty solid, but I imagine that really rough terrain could cause the GPSr to pop out. I am not that worried about this because with the wrist strap acting as a back up all you would have to do is stop and clip it back in. I was very happy to see that it could be clipped in with the wrist strap for this very reason. I am mostly concerned that a bad crash would crunch the GPSr, so on really technical stuff I might stick it in my pack, but for most riding I think it should work great.