The Bouncy Boys

I've got a Touch Pro and found I cannot get it to open a large Map. With WM 6.1 I cannot open a full map file. If I send the visible portion of the map it work fine and like you say looks great. I've now flashed WM 6.5 onto it and I can get it to open a 1:250,000 scale Uk map which is 125 mb but it won't open anything bigger. Oddly I could usually get my XDA Mini S (HTC Wizard) to open a full map so I didn't realise it was a problem until I got the Touch Pro. Others have reported the same issue http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=3002331 but does anyone here have the same problem?

Thanks for the relies, I wish I'd have realised what you could do with OSM before I bought the disc. It was because of the fun I had last summer with my (then) nine year old son that I bought the disc at all. We rode several sections of a nearby Sustrans route. I worked out a route whereby if he got tired we could either take a short cut home or catch a train. In the end he rode all the way back to the house, almost 23 miles! The only problems we had was working out where the cycleway went through the towns. My plan this year was to do some similar rides but bag a fist full of caches every time we went out. I'll see if I've still got my track from last summer. If I have I'll upload it on OSM. Thanks for the help everyone. Pete

I’m very disappointed with the Sustrans National Cycle Network edition of Memory-Map. Unlike other Memory-Map products you cannot send the routes supplied on the disc to your GPS in a practical and useable manner. The routes are grouped as “On Road Routes", "Traffic Free Routes" and "Future Routes". Whilst it is useful to know which parts of the National Cycle Network is “traffic free” and which parts are “on road” you end up with dozens of short routes to travel form A to B. For example, to travel between two nearby towns, Milton Keynes and Bedford I'd have to send 18 files to my GPS. This is hardly user friendly or practical. Had the disc contained a folder with each National Cycle Route in its entire length you could have simply send the part of the route you wanted to ride by using the right click command and select > Operations > Split Track. You could then simply delete the section of Cycleway that you did not wish to ride and export the section of Cycleway that you did intend to ride. This would be quick, simple and logical. Some of the tracks on the CD are as short as 169 feet. It would be ridiculous to stop after 169 feet just to select the next route. For some reason it is not possible to consolidate several tracks into a single file to send to a GPS as the right click> Operations > Join Track refuses to actually join together the supplied routes. The command does work with routes that you create yourself but not with the supplied routes. For reasons I've yet to fathom, the routes do not have the correct name either. National Cycle Route 51 appears on the disc as Track 49. Additionally, the file names of each track do not follow each other sequentially. For example, going west to east you have "Track 49_11" then "Track 49_9" then "Track 49_13" If I were to send these tracks to my GPS I wouldn't know which track to select next once out on the road. Memory-Map sell other products such as "Best Rides of Britain - 100 of the best rides in Britain from MBR and Cycling Weekly” and “150 of the best walks in Britain from Country Walking magazine”. Both of these are really good and have routes that you can overlay on the map, and then you simply select the route you want to follow and send it to your GPS. With the Sustrans National Cycle Network edition of Memory-Map you can only send the route to the GPS in small fragments. It appears that Memory-Map intend the person buying this product is to create their own route by tracing over the supplied Sustrans tracks. If you were to do this with the supplied 1:250,000 scale map you would almost certainly have substantial errors in towns or cites. On a paper 1:250,000 scale map, a 1mm error produces a ¼ km error on the ground. If the supplied routes were useable, a 1:250,000 scale map would be perfectly adequate as most handheld GPS devices cannot use the OS map itself. Sustrans have done a fantastic job creating the National Cycle Network however, if a sign post was to become vandalised or if you just didn’t see a sign, you could easily get lost in built up areas. This is one reason why I want the ability to follow the routes using a GPS. The basic Memory-Map software appears to be excellent however; I bought this version specifically to follow the National Cycle Network with ease. This it appears it cannot do. Despite several emails to Memory-Map support I’ve been unable to find a solution or work round to this problem. They have also resisted my requests for a refund. Overall I’m bitterly disappointed with this edition of Memory-Map. If anyone out there knows how I can get this software to work better, I’d love to know.

I'm still waiting for them to get back to me but I was going to ask for a refund if they couldn't help.

Thanks I'll give that a go.

I’ve just bought the “Sustrans National Cycle Network” edition of Memory Map with the intention of Geo-cycling a few of the routes with my kids this year. I was expecting to be able to send a track from Memory Map to my Garmin GPS so that I can follow the various National Cycle ways. For example if I wanted to follow route 51 I was expecting to be able to send "route 51" to my Garmin. It appears however that the tracks on the CD are broken down into tiny segments, sometimes as little as 169 feet long. There doesn't appear to be a way of sending a whole track a single file to my GPS. So whilst technically I can send a route to my Garmin GPS it is not in a user friendly or practical fashion. I’d have to literally send dozens of tracks to the GPS then keep selecting them on the fly. I’ve tried to create a longer track by using Right click> Operations> Join Track but it didn’t work. This is possibly because two tracks weren’t highlighted however, I can’t seem to highlight two tracks. I’ve tried holding the shift key, the alt key and the control key when selecting a track, but to no avail. I don’t know if I’m using Memory Map wrongly or if it is just very poorly put together. I’ve asked for technical support from Memory Map but they haven’t replied yet. Has anyone any ideas or have I just wasted my money?

Yet another vote for the Windows Mobile PDA route from me. It's worth pointing out that most of the cell phone companies do PDA phones that will do the job. Don't know if it's an option to upgrade to one of these. Hopefully I won't confuse you but it's worth pointing out that there are 2 versions of Windows mobile phones, touchscreen and non touch screen. Go for the touch screen phone because Memory map only leaves a track log on touch screen devices. (Non touch screen phones are referred to as smart phones)

Been a while since I set mine up but looking through my settings my GPS is set to Com port 6. I can't see if there is an in and an out port, I suspect it's only in. I too spent days trying to setup my Holux GPSlim 236 to work with Memory Map 2004 for the first time. I'm now using MMv5 which only has two manufacturer option under GPS setup (Navman & NMEA) but there were several other options in MM 2004 including Sirf. As I had a Sirf star 3 GPS I figured this was the best setting to use. Wrong, I should have used NMEA. This was over two years ago so I don't recall the error message that I was getting at the time but it turns out that what I'd done was to changed the protocol of the Holux (via memory map) therefore the two couldn't connect. There was no way to change this protocol setting back via the PDA. The fix was to remove the battery from the Holux for 24 hours. This discharged an internal battery in the Holux. With the internal battery discharged the GPS reset itself to it's default NMEA setting. Once the protocol was back to normal the setup was a breeze. No sure if this applies to you but I hope it helps. Bouncer

I use an XDA mini S, it's quite old now but it does everything I need. It doesn't have a built in GPS so I have to use a bluetooth GPS, which I tend to think is better than using a built in device. Why, well I can spend a day using Tomtom and memory map on a single charge. The battery on the GPSR is doing the bulk of the work, not the phone. Plus I have a phone pouch on my the shoulder strap of my ruck sack which I put the GPSR into, thus the receiver is alway pointing skyward, ideal when you are under tree cover. If it's raining I can keep my phone in a nice dry pocket until I need to steal a glance at it but can risk having the relatively cheap GPSR in the not so waterproof pouch on the shoulder strap keeping my track. I doubt I'd be able to do this if the phone had a built in GPSR I bet it will keep loosing its signal when buried deep into my waterproofs. I get your point that T Mobile are miss selling the MDA touch but if it's cheap enough I'd say go for it. You may find a separate GPSR more useful than a built in one.

Well done bloke. Looks like I've a bit of catching up to do.

I have an XDA Mini S. For Geocaching I use both Memory-Map and Cachemate. Both work perfectly well on the XDA. You're right, memory-map is just like an OS map with the added advantage that it will always show you exactly when you are using it together with a bluetooth GPS receiver. What you need to do is to read up on paperless caching on this forum but in summary this is what you do. Buy Memory-Map and first install it on your PC, then install it on your phone. Then you download a pocket query from the Geocache web site and load this into Memory-Map on the PC. This will show you where your nearest 500 geocaches are on the OS map. You can then transfer this to your phone and this will allow you to find the caches just using your phone, without the need to carry a normal handheld GPS. If you use cachemate you can also import the pocket query. This will give you all the information that is on the web site for each of the 500 caches that you have on memory-map. Hence you will no longer have any need to carry any paper around with you. If you don't want the expense of Memory-Map then just buy Cachemate. You'll have no need to carry paper around with you and it will point to the cache and give you the distance just like a normal handheld GPS. The only advantage of using memory-Map is that it shows you where the cache is before you even leave the house. I've not used any other software such as Beeline so I can comment on them. Hope this helps.

By using the setup I've described you wouldn't need your Garmin at all to find every cache on your database. You'd be able to find it directly from Cachemate. What's more you can run memory map on a Windows PDA as well as Cachemate so not only would you be able to find a cache using the pointer type display that you get with cachemate but you'd be able to see where you are on a moving map display too. If you ever find yourself on an open moor trying to decide if you are following a sheep trail or a footpath you'll regret not having memory map. By rigidly avoiding Microsoft you are cutting off your nose to spite your face in my opinion. As has been said above, you can use a windows pda with an MAC if you want.

I'm slightly confused. You can upload the waypoints to either Palm or Windows versions of Cachemate. I haven't got my Palm device handy at the moment, does cachemate for Palm point to the actual waypoint/cache? Cachemate for windows OS includes plug-in module that shows the direction and distance to the waypoint (cache) if you have a gps connected to the device. In other words using Cachemate you can read all the details about the cache AND find the cache without using a separate handheld GPS, and as I've said, this may be more accurate than your handheld GPS, especially under tree cover.

I too have a Palm PDA and I really like the Palm OS so this troubles me to say this. You should buy a Windows Mobile PDA. You can get them with built in GPS receivers or you can use a Bluetooth GPS which will cost about £40 extra. Cachemate is available for the Windows Mobile OS as well. I've now got a Windows Mobile PDA based mobile phone which is my primary geocache device. I got this as an upgrade on my mobile phone contract because it was a lot cheaper to do this than buy a normal PDA. I run Memory Map and Cachemate it seek caches. I can even post my finds on this site from it. What's more because I use a Sirf star 3 bluetooth GPS it's more accurate than my Garmin!

Actually, this proved not to be a fix. I've found the real fix and just in case someone else has the same problem I've decided to reply to my own post. It turns out that every now and then the userdata file on my PPC becomes corrupt. When it does it stops leaving a tracklog. This is probably due to the fact that my PPC is an O2 XDA mini S phone which I rarely turn off. I guess if I was using an Ipaq or similar this wouldn't happen. All I have to do is either rename the userdata file "olduserdata" or just simply delete the file. Either way the next time I run Memory-Map it writes itself a new userdata file and then starts to leave tracklogs again.

Ah ha! Overlay, list method seems to have done the trick. When I looked at this I hadn't noticed the drop down box to change from waypoint to tracks. Thanks to all who replied.

I have Memory-map V4 which I use on my PPC. Sometimes my BT GPS leaves the red tracklog line on the map and other times it doesn't. If it leaves the red line I can click on it and get the tracklog properties etc. If it doesn't leave the red line I can't seem to find a menu item that turns this on. I've tried overlays, show all to no avail. Anyone know how I turn this feature on from the PDA?

Have you found any caches at all with your Garmin yet? Just a thought, the caches on the geocache web site are to the WGS84 datum (world geographic survey 1984) Is your GPS configured to WGS84? On your GPS go to the main menu, then setup menu, then units. You should see the "Map Datum" as WGS84 and position format as hddd mm.mmm'. You could always check your GPS is calibrated correctly by finding a trig point near you and checking the co-ords on your GPS against the co-ords for the trig point. Have a look here http://www.trigpointinguk.com/trigs/

If you have the right software you can have at least 500 caches on you Palm. Have a look here http://www.smittyware.com/palm/cachemate/ If you are a premium member you can create Pocket Queries which contain a whole page description of a cache. For example you can run a querie to show the nearest 500 caches in your area that you haven't found then load these into your Palm using Cachemate. Have a search on this forum for paperless caching. No doubt someone will know of other software that you can use. I've used Cachmate on the Palm and found it excellent. I've now got a Pocket PC and use the PPC versin of cachemate which will even interface with my Bluetooth GPS to show the direction and distance to the co-ods on the cache page.

I'm a relative newbie but when I tried the SiRF setup I couldn't get MM on my PPC to work with my Holux GPSlim 236 reciever. Using NMEA it work fine. What setup should I use?

This doesn't half sound like my cache. Maybe it isn't, I don't know but my ears are on fire at the moment. In MY cache the instructions contained in part one tell you where to find a small black plastic box. It also tells you NOT to remove the screws in the box but to peel back some tape from a carefully milled slot in the bottom of the box. I spent quite a bit of time making this box. The tape over the milled slot has one edge folded over on itself so that it can easily be peeled back. When the tape is peeled back you read the co-ordinates to the next part of the cache in a mirror. In daylight this can be done without a torch. The idea is that it adds a bit of a mental challenge working out if you see a 2 or a 5 and a 6 or a 9. Not the most difficult thing in the world I’ll grant you but it's different and my kids really enjoyed doing this so I thought other kids would appreciate it too. I checked over the cache recently and all was good, the next log after my maintenance visit said that its hiding place had become a wasp’s nest and the lid had been removed. With no find or DNF posted to explain why/when the lid was removed I put this down to muggles. Whatever, I’ve now moved the box to a wasp free area and screwed the lid back on properly. Anyway, the point I’m actually making is I carry a torch with me even during daylight to peer inside logs and under rocks before putting my hand in to retrieve a cache. After all, if you didn’t look first you might put your hand in a wasp’s nest!!!!!!