ydns

Dale, I want to thank you for all your efforts in building and sharing these maps. The entire GPS community should be very appreciative of your efforts. It is not a trivial effort and I hope you are appropriately rewarded via your PayPal link. I wanted to request that you also provide the MD5 hash of the files you generate. As the files are quite large, this is a good way to know that the file was not corrupted on its way to us. In addition, it may allow us to use bittorrent to download the files. I have little trust in bittorrent without pre-published MD5 hashes from the "software provider". A bittorrent seed would relieve some of the bandwidth burden and spread it out among your appreciative users more. Give these some thought and again - thanks for your efforts! Scott

I would like to follow up on my last post. I haven't been geocaching too much, but since disabling WAAS, my GPS tracks have been a lot more stable - they don't jump around much. In addition, over time they seem to be fairly consistent coordinates. The one thing I do notice is that on any given day I can ride a bike trail and get a certain GPS track. The next day I will get a "parallel" track off about ~2-3 meters to the East or West (NOT North/South ever). This is so consistent its scary. I'm really starting wonder about possible intentional regular shifting of GPS data to skew any reliability dependence. It COULD also be based on certain satellites being present, but accuracy is the whole purpose of GPS, any specific satellite shouldn't throw the calculation by this much on such a regular basis! Thats like syncing your watch alternately with a accurate clock and a clock that is always off by a bit and is never fixed by its owner, even though they know its wrong. I'll not claim conspiracy, but this has been an odd discovery. Other than this finding, I believe the Venture CX has some accuracy issues - under canopy, but not enough to make it unusable.

I'm currently sitting inside at my computer and I saw a review on the GPSMap76csx (http://gpsinformation.us/gps60c/g76Creview.html) which led me to onder about the WAAS setting. I have had that enabled for almost the whole time I've owned the Venture Cx. Well I turned it off and my reading (indoors) went to ~20ft error. I am surprised. I will be trying this out over the next week to see if it has any impact on the accuracy. I had no idea that "WAAS enabling" could have a detrimental effect.

I have definite accuracy issues with my venture cx. It is rarely consistent even in open fields. Since most geocaches are in woods, I find myself circling for awhile while the Venture changes its mind. I almost always have ~20-40ft accuracy showing. I am usually off by many yards. I have tried waiting to see if it starts tracking better. I have even reset it to see if it changes. Usually no difference. This is the 2nd problem I've had with this thing and it takes some of the fun (and usefulness) out of this device.

I want to find out if anyone else is seeing the same issue. When I try to manually delete three cache entries from my list of caches, it crashes on the 3rd delete. I've tried going elsewhere in the menus between the deletes to see if that resolved the issue but it didn't. The screen freezes and fades out. A press to the power button reboots it. Does anyone else with a Garmin Etrex Venture, Vista or Legend CX have this issue? I have tried both 2.40 firmware and the new 2.50 firmware and there is no difference in behavior. I have a 1 month old unit that I've treated very well and this is the only problem I've encountered. The search engine here isn't helpful for searching on "cx" since its too short. And there are a million words to describe what happens, so if this is a redundant post, sorry. Thanks for any assistance. I'll likely be calling this into support on Monday. ydns

I've gotten past the issue, but at least wanted to voice a "complaint". I use a more automated password process and so issues like this tend to be more frequent for me. Any who, thanks for the feedback. <phip, phip, phip, PHIP,PHIP,PHIP> "STOP and drop to the ground! We have your forum password and you've been very very bad!" <muffled scream><PHIP, PHIP, PHIP,phip,phip, phip,...>

Not to be picky, but if I can use a password for a geocaching.com account, I should be able to log into the forums (Groundspeak) with it, but I've found that there is some incompatibility with the password length/complexity on the forums preventing existing geocaching.com users from logging in. If a moderator emails me, I can provide more details, but won't be posting my password here or anything. And yes changing (simplifying ) the password resolved the issue, but I figured the issue should be pointed out and rectified somehow to prevent issues in the future for new users (like me ) Thanks, ydns