TriCityGuy

Having just personally placed what appears to be one of only two or three caches in the world only reachable with SCUBA gear I fully expect not to get many hits, but that's why they're higher degrees of difficulty. Go for it and monitor the cache. If somebody does try and find it, go out of your way to congratulate them via e-mail or support them if they have trouble. Geocachers seem to be a tight community and it was so weird that within 8 hours of creating "Chelan SCUBA Cache" I got an e-mail from the guy that created "The Rapture of the Deep" congratulating me for creating it. Even funnier was that I had done a search for "SCUBA" before I placed my cache and found his thousands of miles from my home. Trick will be naming it. What word would other paddlers search for? If it's "paddler" or something like that I'd make sure and include it somewhere in the cache name. Enjoy

Having just personally placed what appears to be one of only two or three caches in the world only reachable with SCUBA gear I fully expect not to get many hits, but that's why they're higher degrees of difficulty. Go for it and monitor the cache. If somebody does try and find it, go out of your way to congratulate them via e-mail or support them if they have trouble. Geocachers seem to be a tight community and it was so weird that within 8 hours of creating "Chelan SCUBA Cache" I got an e-mail from the guy that created "The Rapture of the Deep" congratulating me for creating it. Even funnier was that I had done a search for "SCUBA" before I placed my cache and found his thousands of miles from my home. Trick will be naming it. What word would other paddlers search for? If it's "paddler" or something like that I'd make sure and include it somewhere in the cache name. Enjoy

And I did find a comparison tool at the Garmin site. http://www.garmin.com/outdoor/compare.jsp

WeatherGuy is right about the Vista. It's the top choice in the eTrex line, but is also the most expensive at $325+. I went with a Legend for $225. It only has 8MB of memory and no altimeter or compass, but I couldn't upsell myself. It still has maps built in to at least city arterial level and can download if you splurge on the $100 MapSource CD. Having started with the bottom of the line generic eTrex (yellow) when they first came out (no maps at all), but a steal at $120, I then looked at the Venture. 1MB of memory and display that's like the yellow one. I'd either go Legend as a good value or splurge and spend the extra C-note for Vista if I had my choice today.

You could have the bug travel to sensitive countries like Afghanistan. I know having had a security clearance that are off-limits and notify-before-you-consider-going countries. Like Somalia, Yemen, North Korea, Cuba, Arkansas, Chad, etc. (I might have made one of those up Or a goal to places we've had military actions to help people in. Kuwait, Vietnam, Korea, most of Europe, etc.

You could have the bug travel to sensitive countries like Afghanistan. I know having had a security clearance that are off-limits and notify-before-you-consider-going countries. Like Somalia, Yemen, North Korea, Cuba, Arkansas, Chad, etc. (I might have made one of those up Or a goal to places we've had military actions to help people in. Kuwait, Vietnam, Korea, most of Europe, etc.

I haven't plotted anything, but my experience has been that running NiMH in my Garmin Legend shows the battery indicator to start off about half, but even as it goes to zero the GPS just stays on a lot longer. I tend to get 8 or so hours out of my 1800ma NiMH vs. 6 or 7 hours out of a set of Duracells. I absolutely concur about temperature. As a snowmobiler if I can only get 3 or 4 hours out of a set of alkalines. Leaving my unit on a windscreen mount in 20 degree weather just kills alkalines. NiMH seem to still hang closer to 8 hours in the cold. I do notice that if I don't use a freshly charged set of NiMH that they discharge some over the course of a couple of weeks.

Good to know some airlines do allow and that there is an osciallator in them that does transmit a signal. I would imagine that the field generated is of minimal risk and have taken to sort of tucking my Garmin Legend under my elbow on Delta after we hit 10,000 feet. I've gotten to fly right seat on a friend's Cessna Citation a few times and was thrilled how much easier it was to get a signal compared to a sideways facing passenger window. Comparing position and details with the plane's far more featured GPS the pilot joked that he wished he had bought my unit over the $50,000 plane unit and had more gas instead. (as he taps the fuel gauge and smirks)