zapped

If you only want this for topo maps in your car the answer is still USAPhotoMaps. It will display scanned USGS topo maps on your laptop with real-time tracking from your GPS. Doesn't get any better than free now does it?

Most of the hominids I've seen at US National Parks seem to congregate in flocks near large patches of asphalt covered with fossil-fuel burning transportation. You get a mile away from any parking lot and you'll see relatively few of that species, and two miles grants you almost perfect serenity if you stay off the most heavily-travelled trails. Anyway... In ye olden days I'd preplan my backcountry trips using USGS topo quads, marking waypoints and drawing out bearing lines between 'em. Nowadays I'll preplan in Delorme TopoUSA or USAPhotoMaps, then transfer the waypoints & routes to my GPS. I honestly don't feel a strong need to have a detailed topomap displayed on my Legend Cx as long as I have all the waypoints & routes preloaded from my preplanning. Now in truth I do download the Mapsource Topo maps (1:100,000) to my GPS, but really the waypoints are enough. So maybe I'm part of the problem --- even though I'm an avid GPS user I wouldn't buy the detailed TopoMaps for my GPSr, since I can see decent detail in Delorme or 1:24000 detail from the scanned quads in USAPhotoMaps while I'm preplanning.

When you say "Mapsource but on a bigger screen", do you actually mean the Metroguide product that runs under the Mapsource wrapper GUI? And if so, does that run on your older laptop now? Because if it does, you'd just need to hook up the GPSr to the laptop with its serial cable, fire up Metroguide, and you'd have a position on the laptop screen. But... you also said "Topo maps out in the boonies". The cheapest way to get USGS topo maps onto a laptop with tracking also happens to be the best way to do it if you ask me ---- USAPhotoMaps, written by a retired airline pilot named Doug Cox. It's donation-ware, and eats scanned topo maps and sat photos off Terraserver, but displays them seamlessly, and supports GPS tracking. Oh, no CD on the thinkpad. If you have ethernet, then connect the laptop to your local area network. If you copy the install CDs for Metroguide or S&T2000 to the laptop over the LAN, you *might* be able to install from those directories. If not, install a CD-emulator program (Virtual CD, Virtual Drive, etc) on the thinkpad - this adds a new drive name of your choosing (eg D: or Z: or whatever) that looks like a CD but is actually just the files on your hard drive. Now try installing from the CD-emulator program. However I don't know if Win95 will run any of this software, whether it's the emulator or the map software. Win95 is beyond ancient. Another option is to simply by an external IDE cage for under US$30 and shove a spare CD reader in it. But that will only work if you have a USB or Firewire port on the thinkpad to talk to the IDE cage. If you have or are willing to buy a spare laptop-size (2.5") hard drive you could put that spare drive in the laptop & try a full WinXP install. You'd probably have to download additional drivers from IBM support to complete the installation - that's true for just about any laptop, new or old. I don't know, though, if a 486 with (probably) a small amount of RAM is beefy enough to handle WinXP. US$200 will not buy even a decent used laptop here in Austin, TX. I'd recommend you budget US$500 for a sale-priced Dell. For that price you'd get a Pentium M running around 1.8GHz, about 512MB RAM, a 40GB h.d. at least, a DVD/CD burner/reader, and a 15" screen, as long as you wait for the right sale. Careful though, some of their $500 systems are much wimpier - Celerons running slower, less memory, small h.d., CD but not DVD burner, 14" screen. Caveat emptor. Best o' luck.

If you want to know how Metroguide v7 is doing nowadays, just give me an example address that doesn't work for you currently & I can try it on my eTrex Legend Cx with the appropriate Metroguide v7 section downloaded. Maybe make up an alternate address that's broken if the information is personal.

I eBay'd my original Legend (B&W) in favor of a new Legend Cx, but when I had Metroguide USA v3 map sections downloaded to my original Legend, I'm pretty sure it navigated along roads! I used it for navigation that way on vacations for a couple of years, but maybe I was hallucinating. Dunno, it's been a long day...

I might be guessing incorrectly, but it sounds to me like your pointer is set up as a "course pointer" instead of a "bearing pointer". Almost as if the GPS knows you passed your waypoint and now it's pointing straight ahead (instead of at the waypoint behind you) because it's trying to follow the roads to get you back to the urban waypoint. In other words, perhaps it's telling you to stay on the road heading away from a waypoint for a bit, then it will maybe tell you to make a couple of right turns to get back to it? Try bringing up the menu when you're on the compass page & toggling between course pointer & bearing pointer. Apologies if I'm not getting the exact semantics right. EDIT: another simpler possiblity if you're in an urban environment (3rd st / 4th st) is that buildings around you are blocking satellites, increasing the circle of uncertainty, and causing the pointer to oscillate around.

My choice was neither City Select nor City Navigator. I used Metroguide USA v3 for several years, until I purchased MetroGuide North America v7 just recently. You can find v7 for about $80 street if you look around. There were and are no unlock codes and all map segments can be freely downloaded to any/all Garmin GPS units you choose (given they support mapping). The software is not copy-protected nor does it require serial numbers or activation to install on your PC. The downside is the recent Metroguide versions do not (officially) support routing on the unit, only on the PC. However, all the data is available on the Metroguide DVD but Garmin's MapSource wrapper-software strips the routing info on the way down to your GPS. The workaround to that is a simple wrapper program "img2gps" found here. Using that wrapper to download your Metroguide maps allows routing to be performed within your GPS unit.

Congratulations. I've just emailed you the discounted final price and am locking this topic per forum guidelines. Hope you enjoy the Legend as much as I have for the last couple of years. And hope I can stand being without a GPS for a few days while I wait for my new color model to arrive!

I posted my Legend for sale on eBay and then realized I also could've listed it here directly. Well, as an incentive to bid or use the "buy it now", I'll offer a $10 discount for any Groundspeak forum member who joined on or before May 25 2006. If you win the auction, just post a followup here so I can see from your user profile when you joined, and deduct $10 from your payment. I'm also adding this incentive to description area of my auction. My Legend has been well cared for and includes all the original stuff - serial cable, lanyard, manuals, box. I'm just moving up to a Legend Cx this summer. Nothing funky going on here - I've been an eBay member since 1999 and have 100% positive feedback. eBay will still get full commission on the final auction value, but a Geocacher will get a small discount. The auction ends tomorrow Saturday 5/27 at about 5pm PDT or 8pm EDT. My Legend for sale on eBay - Jim

Team010, it _is_ possible to export routes & pushpins from Microsoft Streets & Trips if you're willing to also go through EasyGPS. Copy your S&T file to a safe place, then pass it through st2gpx. This will output a .gpx file which can be loaded into EasyGPS, and pushed out to your eTrex from there. I am doing this with Microsoft MapPoint 2002 (same as S&T I believe) and it works just great. Regarding mapping, Garmin "MapSource" refers to the free viewer, not the dataset. You probably have the US "Metroguide" dataset (two CDs), which will perform routing on the PC but not withing the GPS when you upload the route. What I do as a workaround is to let MetroGuide rough out the route then add a number of waypoints at critical intersections. Not perfect, but it works well enough for me. In case you're wondering, I use Garmin MapSource+Metroguide+Topo-USWest, Delorme TopoUSA4.0 on DVD, Microsoft MapPoint, and my beloved USAPhotoMaps. Each one has its pros & cons, but overall I think the Garmin software is the winner thanks to its tight integration with Garmin GPS units. [EDIT: I originally added this, but I was dead wrong: "It's also nice that Garmin .mps files are in GPX-XML format, so I can simply change the .mps to .gpx if I want to hack around in EasyGPS." I was lost in the gps tower of babel, and even gpsbabel won't convert my .mps files to .gpx. I was thinking about USAPhotoMaps .xml files, which can be renamed to .gpx & opened in EasyGPS. *So* confusing! ]

Hi, I've been a geocaching.com member since March 2002, although not really an active geocacher. A co-worker reminded me about this "Garage Sale" forum, so I thought I'd post a pointer to my Ebay auction of my Garmin eTrex (yellow) - here. I also have a Garmin data cable (not power) - it's here. I only sell on Ebay occasionally (usually techno-geek stuff I'm upgrading), and I have 100% positive feedback dating back to July 2001. The yellow eTrex and cable are both in perfect working order. I enjoyed using them both, but recently got an eTrex Legend because I wanted 1) longer waypoint names, 2) more routes, and 3) a higher-resolution screen. Hopefully the new toy will get me back into geocaching, too --- I've still got TravelBugs that haven't travelled beyond my desk drawer Happy bidding if you choose to do so.

Thanks for the replies. We never went hunting for the two bugs I mentioned because we stumbled across Tuxedo first. We placed him in another cache in our area a couple of days later. Also got the four TravelBugs I ordered, at least of couple of which I'll be placing far from Austin during vacations this summer.

Thanks for the replies. We never went hunting for the two bugs I mentioned because we stumbled across Tuxedo first. We placed him in another cache in our area a couple of days later. Also got the four TravelBugs I ordered, at least of couple of which I'll be placing far from Austin during vacations this summer.

I got it from the Files section of the Magellan Meridian group. Fired it up & it worked great on your sample set. Thanks so much for your perseverance!

Both of your briefcases are still empty, at least for me. Sorry for the nagging, it's just that I'd like to give your routing method a try

There a lot of caches around us in Austin, TX, but not a lot of Travel bugs. I'd like to go find a couple of travel bugs but have a couple of etiquette questions: 1) This bug's goal is to head to Alaska. I certainly wouldn't move it from Austin down to South Padre Island, but is it OK to simply move it to another nearby cache (perhaps northward only a mile or two), simply for the Thrill of the Hunt? I'd probably complete the find & relocation on the same weekend. 2) The Key Chains bug wants key chains added to it. But again I'd like to find it Just For the Fun of It, so same question - catch & release OK?

HeroJay - you're probably overwhelmed with the responses, but I thought I'd add in my specific recipe (above). Pictures off my Canon S-20 camera are 2048x1536 pixel JPGs and about 2.2MB in size. In my software of choice (ACDSee) I resize to 640x480 and then do a "Save As" to a new filename, to preserve my original shot. When I "Save As", there's an "Options" button where I can slide a lever to choose the quality in percent. I use "75%", but on some software the slide is just labelled with "High quality", "Medium quality" etc. 75% is about medium, I think. The resulting picture size varies from 75KB to 98KB for me, dependent on the amount of image detail in the shot. I also experimented with a conversion to 256-shade greyscale, but that only saved 3-4KB in the JPG filesize when I tried it. It's possibly to compress an 800x600 and get it under 100KB, but it looks worse than a crisper 640x480 at higher quality settings. I also found that uploading is NOT reliable using Netscape 4.7, so I switch to Internet Explorer for this task Good luck & happy uploading!

HeroJay - you're probably overwhelmed with the responses, but I thought I'd add in my specific recipe (above). Pictures off my Canon S-20 camera are 2048x1536 pixel JPGs and about 2.2MB in size. In my software of choice (ACDSee) I resize to 640x480 and then do a "Save As" to a new filename, to preserve my original shot. When I "Save As", there's an "Options" button where I can slide a lever to choose the quality in percent. I use "75%", but on some software the slide is just labelled with "High quality", "Medium quality" etc. 75% is about medium, I think. The resulting picture size varies from 75KB to 98KB for me, dependent on the amount of image detail in the shot. I also experimented with a conversion to 256-shade greyscale, but that only saved 3-4KB in the JPG filesize when I tried it. It's possibly to compress an 800x600 and get it under 100KB, but it looks worse than a crisper 640x480 at higher quality settings. I also found that uploading is NOT reliable using Netscape 4.7, so I switch to Internet Explorer for this task Good luck & happy uploading!

quote:Originally posted by Mtn_Bkng_Dave:IN THE FRIENDS FOLDER? Um, no, that's an empty folder when I go into it. Weird thing is at the top level it shows "4 items" in "Friends" folder.

I also have the standard (yellow) eTrex ($89 at Fry's). I use it to talk to my Toshiba laptop which has no legacy (serial/parallel) ports, so I'm forced to go thru the Garmin eTrex-to-serial cable to a USB-to-serial adapter, to the laptop's USB port. Amazingly, it works fine with the following three programs I own: 1) Delorme TopoUSA 2.0 with the TopoUSA patch from their website, eTrex talking in "Garmin" mode. Download/upload waypoints, route, and tracklog just fine. TopoUSA 3.0 has come out since, and 4.0 is due out in April. I haven't tested either of these programs. 2) Delorme Street Atlas USA 8.0 works with eTrex again in "Garmin" mode. The "talking" feature of the program, which verbally informs you when turns on your route are coming up, is really nifty! Have not tried upload/download since I use this program only for navigating. 3) Microsoft MapPoint 2002, works with eTrex in "NMEA" mode only as far as I can tell. Still it does what it's supposed to - places your location on the map & pans when it needs to. MapPoint has the most primitive GPS display since the current location is an icon of a circle with a car inside it, with no direction show. Both Delorme products show direction, and TopoUSA also shows bearing and speed details in a sub-window. Whichever hardware/software you buy, try to buy it from a local store with a liberal return policy. Play with the interface in both the hardware & software to see if NMEA or a native manufacturer's mode works. Make sure you don't have ANY devices using the serial port you hook the GPS to (e.g. PalmPilot's HotSync running in the background sometimes causes problems

I also have the standard (yellow) eTrex ($89 at Fry's). I use it to talk to my Toshiba laptop which has no legacy (serial/parallel) ports, so I'm forced to go thru the Garmin eTrex-to-serial cable to a USB-to-serial adapter, to the laptop's USB port. Amazingly, it works fine with the following three programs I own: 1) Delorme TopoUSA 2.0 with the TopoUSA patch from their website, eTrex talking in "Garmin" mode. Download/upload waypoints, route, and tracklog just fine. TopoUSA 3.0 has come out since, and 4.0 is due out in April. I haven't tested either of these programs. 2) Delorme Street Atlas USA 8.0 works with eTrex again in "Garmin" mode. The "talking" feature of the program, which verbally informs you when turns on your route are coming up, is really nifty! Have not tried upload/download since I use this program only for navigating. 3) Microsoft MapPoint 2002, works with eTrex in "NMEA" mode only as far as I can tell. Still it does what it's supposed to - places your location on the map & pans when it needs to. MapPoint has the most primitive GPS display since the current location is an icon of a circle with a car inside it, with no direction show. Both Delorme products show direction, and TopoUSA also shows bearing and speed details in a sub-window. Whichever hardware/software you buy, try to buy it from a local store with a liberal return policy. Play with the interface in both the hardware & software to see if NMEA or a native manufacturer's mode works. Make sure you don't have ANY devices using the serial port you hook the GPS to (e.g. PalmPilot's HotSync running in the background sometimes causes problems

Reading old posts today & noticed Markwell's links are broken. Here are the corrected ones I found for anyone who's interested:

quote:Originally posted by Exocet:Unlike others, I've had no problems using the AvantGo channels to locally store copies of the Geocaching.com pages. It works for me and thus I have no problem with it, but... : A stripped-down version of the pages that iSilo, Plucker or some other AvantGo-alternative could access would be appreciated. I've seen a number of recommendations to use iSilo in this thread, and also some comments that iSilo can be a bit complex. Let me add some (hopefully) useful suggestions. The simply part is obtaining both iSilo for your Palm and iSiloX for your desktop PC. What I then do with iSilo is to look for the caches in my area based on a longitude/latitude, and read one level deep from that result page (25 caches) so that I get the text description of each cache. In my area of Austin, TX, that creates about a 350KB file for my Palm. I had to tweak some settings inside iSilo to get this to work, so let me share an iSiloX document list called "GeoCache_Only.ixl" which performs the search around my home area. You can load this into your desktop iSiloX and adapt to your needs. Here's how... Within iSiloX, just do a File-->Open on the GeoCache_Only.ixl file, then double-click on the one document called GeoCaching. Go to the "Source" tab, select the one source URL shown, and right-click to edit the URL. You'll see in the URL the origin_lat & origin_long values which you can modify for your area. Next, go the "Destination" tab and select your Palm as the destination for the URLs you'll be downloading. After that, say "OK" in the form and you'll be back on the main iSiloX page with GeoCaching still selected. Pull down Document-->Convert and wait for it to complete. Then HotSync your Palm and review the results. Hope this helps. Good luck