AaronO

I was looking for a local cache a couple of days ago. I was walking up a road closed to vehicle traffic and three guys were walking down it, one of them had that unit on. I'm in the same area as Lazyboy & Mitey Mite -- made me laugh having just seen this post and then the same day going out for a hike and seeing somebody actually wearing it.

I'm using 2.26 and haven't had any lockups (yet).

I'm using 2.26 and haven't had any lockups (yet).

I use a lumbar pack too. It's big enough to carry the hiking essentials (water, first aid, small flashlight, etc.) and can also stuff a bit of loot in it. Has water holders on the sides. Pretty similar setup to what Navdog listed. http://www.marmot.com/products/packs/lmbrpk_2502_walkabout.html Although mine doesn't quite look like that, guess I have an older model.

Is there any software that will show you where the sats are at a given time? It would be nice if you wanted to hide a cache and could find the best time of day given the coords of where you want to place it, by looking to see how many sats you would have available from that spot.

Lemme start by saying I'm still fairly new to the GPS community, but I can tell you some of my experience with my unit which is the Vista. 24MB is quite a bit of memory. I wouldn't worry too much about 19MB vs 24MB. I have the Garmin Mapsource:TOPO CDs and have loaded 10 map regions around my area (OR/CA border by I5). I have 30 or 40 waypoints in it and 2 large tracks stored. Even with all that in there the GPS is saying only 14% of the 24MB is in use (that's 3.36MB). As far as loading the maps, you really only need to do it one time. If you have any friends who have a PC maybe you can just go over there and install the program (it's only 6mb on the disk). There's enough memory in the unit that you could store a wide area of where you plan to be playing around and then you wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. I haven't personally found the Mapsource:TOPO very useful other than loading maps on the GPS. It is a decent source of data as far as points of interest and altitude information. It is extremely lacking in terms of the roads you find outside of cities -- service roads, logging roads, etc... A few of the more majore dirt roads exist on the map, but most do not. The lack of the dirt road detail was a big disappointment to me with this software -- that's something you can find on any topo map. I registered ExpertGPS for my planning needs. It's far superior to the garmin topo for planning. It uses scanned USGS topo maps and also provides aerial photos. Between looking at the topos and looking at the actual photos, it's pretty easy to plan routes and upload the data to your GPS. I recently used this program to plan a route to a cache kinda out in the middle of nowhere. Using the aerial photos let me spot the roads easily and plan the turnoffs (I stuck waypoints at all the road junctions). This is something the garmin data didn't even come close to providing. I need to experiment a little more with planning routes. I tried what you said you wanted to do, about planning your trail and following it. It worked for the most part, but I got my route truncated from having too many points (I had traced out the roads I was gonna follow on the aerial photos). I then tried uploading the routes as tracks, but it still got truncated, although it made it almost all the way this time. My total route was around 12.5 miles of dirt road travel. I need to experiment a little more to see how i can optimize that a bit, I guess I was just too detailed tracing the road. It might work a bit better for hiking since the distance traveled would be much lower. Or you could divide up the route into different tracks and do it in stages. The performance of the Vista has been really good. It does chow through batteries pretty fast would be my only complaint. I normally use it to track my bike rides. Turn it on and stick in my backpack then when I come home I can plot it on a map -- works great for that. Recently I started trying this geocache thing and it has worked excellent for that as well. It's a great size for hiking. I don't think I'd want anything much bigger.

Lemme start by saying I'm still fairly new to the GPS community, but I can tell you some of my experience with my unit which is the Vista. 24MB is quite a bit of memory. I wouldn't worry too much about 19MB vs 24MB. I have the Garmin Mapsource:TOPO CDs and have loaded 10 map regions around my area (OR/CA border by I5). I have 30 or 40 waypoints in it and 2 large tracks stored. Even with all that in there the GPS is saying only 14% of the 24MB is in use (that's 3.36MB). As far as loading the maps, you really only need to do it one time. If you have any friends who have a PC maybe you can just go over there and install the program (it's only 6mb on the disk). There's enough memory in the unit that you could store a wide area of where you plan to be playing around and then you wouldn't have to worry about it anymore. I haven't personally found the Mapsource:TOPO very useful other than loading maps on the GPS. It is a decent source of data as far as points of interest and altitude information. It is extremely lacking in terms of the roads you find outside of cities -- service roads, logging roads, etc... A few of the more majore dirt roads exist on the map, but most do not. The lack of the dirt road detail was a big disappointment to me with this software -- that's something you can find on any topo map. I registered ExpertGPS for my planning needs. It's far superior to the garmin topo for planning. It uses scanned USGS topo maps and also provides aerial photos. Between looking at the topos and looking at the actual photos, it's pretty easy to plan routes and upload the data to your GPS. I recently used this program to plan a route to a cache kinda out in the middle of nowhere. Using the aerial photos let me spot the roads easily and plan the turnoffs (I stuck waypoints at all the road junctions). This is something the garmin data didn't even come close to providing. I need to experiment a little more with planning routes. I tried what you said you wanted to do, about planning your trail and following it. It worked for the most part, but I got my route truncated from having too many points (I had traced out the roads I was gonna follow on the aerial photos). I then tried uploading the routes as tracks, but it still got truncated, although it made it almost all the way this time. My total route was around 12.5 miles of dirt road travel. I need to experiment a little more to see how i can optimize that a bit, I guess I was just too detailed tracing the road. It might work a bit better for hiking since the distance traveled would be much lower. Or you could divide up the route into different tracks and do it in stages. The performance of the Vista has been really good. It does chow through batteries pretty fast would be my only complaint. I normally use it to track my bike rides. Turn it on and stick in my backpack then when I come home I can plot it on a map -- works great for that. Recently I started trying this geocache thing and it has worked excellent for that as well. It's a great size for hiking. I don't think I'd want anything much bigger.