Den-Den and Pi

First, let me say you have the most amazing site I've ever seen. Very well done!! I'm sure you have a lot of band-width issues and I thought of something that could help that and help your users at the same time: When I go on a trip, I like to find caches by clicking on the map of california, then drilling down, panning, etc. The problem is, I can't bookmark a map that I've found in the past. So, when I want to look at the area again, I zoom, pan and click until I find it again. This takes time and uses a lot of bandwidth, I would assume, with the number of users that must hit geocaching.com The solution, however, is very simple. In the form tag, change it from a POST to a GET. Then users can bookmark the map! Whadda ya think? Please?!?! :-) Great site!

I had the exact same question before I bought my Sportrak Pro and I wasn't sure until after I owned it for a week or so. Now, I think they are worth it. They make is far easier to drive to the starting point of a cache. Once you are on the trail, though, it depends on where you are: - If you're up on the mountains where you would have a topo anyway, you really need a printed map. I use the ones from Maptech and love them. I wouldn't be caught in the wilderness without a good topo and a compass :-) - For local, short-hike caches where you would go on a quick walk and never think of taking a map, the maps in the GPS are great and more than adequate. In short, I'm glad I have a mapping GPS.

You can't use the actual maps from maptech IN your sportrak -- only the Magellan software works (as is true with any GPS unit or brand, much to my annoyance...) That being said, I'm pretty happy with Mapsend Topo overall in the Sportrak. It's not super accurate, but it works great for getting to and from caches. I use Maptech for my printed maps. Best print quality I've seen by far!

quote: 1. Is the Sportrac pro compatible with Terr Nav? They don't have it listed on their website as a compatible unit. Yes, it works fine, for the most part. Under GPS settings, I set it to "NMEA - Map 330". It will upload and download waypoints, but I could not get it to do "real time GPS'ing." That's not a feature I would use anyway, though -- too hard to lug a desktop into the field :-) New Utility for Maptech! One of the annoying things about Maptech is it won't import .loc files from geocaching.com directly. So, I wrote a utility to convert them! To use it, I: 1. save each of the .loc files to a different name on the desktop. 2. highlight them all and drag them to the utility (also on the desktop) 3. it puts them all together and leaves them in the right format. I haven't officially released it yet because it's written in Perl and I just tried a utility called "perl2exe" to make it into a regular program (i.e. you don't need perl to use it). Now I just need to buy "perl2exe" and give it to the world. I've just been hesitating, because I don't want to spend the $50.00 right now :-)