GeekBoy.from.Illinois

When Google sends their cars around taking pictures for street view, they also capture wifi signals to assist in their geo-loaction services. Most likely, when they went near the locations for the residential wifi service, they picked up the the MAC Address of the router, and the wifi SSID. Now, later, when you connect to the internet through that router, they know exactly where it is. When you use a MiFi, they probably don't have it in their database, so they have no idea where you are. Even if the MiFi does have a GPSr in it, the wifi signal doesn't communicate that to your iPod, so your iPod doesn't know where it is when it is communicating to any apps running on the device.

Did your GPSr have issues before this started where if you moved it or bumped the cable it would disconnect? Does the cable connector seem to be loose? I ask these because my Oregon 400t had started acting like that before it got to the point where it would more often not connect that it would connect. Since my unit was out of warranty I decided to pop it open to see what I could see. In my case, the ribbon cable that connected the USB port to the system board in the GPSr had come loose on the port connector end. It uses a fragile "ZIF" cable connector and the "lock" had apparently worked its way open over the years of use, and the cable was not always making contact. After reseating the cable, it has worked fine. I wouldn't recommend anyone else try this on their own, but instead that they call Garmin, as they are pretty good with out of warranty repairs. I don't know why I didn't call them myself, but I got lucky.

I've managed to sort this one. The next stage feature uses one of your 5000 caches. If you've already got 5000 caches it won't work Would have been nice to have an error message rather than let you figure it out. I believe it is documented that the "next stage" feature does require one open Geocache "slot" be available for it to work properly. I remember reading that when the feature was introduced.

The only time I've ever had problems with 1-3 hour battery life with my Colorado (or Oregon) were when I was caching in sub-zero temps and left the GPSr hanging on a lanyard outside my coat. If I moved the GPSr inside the coat when not being viewed, the battery life was easily 4-6 hours on cheap NiMH batteries. During warmer caching seasons, I get a full day out of a fresh set of NiMH batteries.

And if one wants another option, Virtual Box from Sun/Oracle is still free, and is on par with VMWare and Parallels for user experience. The drawback to all of these is that the user still needs to perform a Windows install in order to use their Windows programs, but they are the most stable/reliable way to run Windows programs on an Intel based Mac.

My Oregon 400t is having the same issues now too. I haven't attempted to open my unit yet, but I suspect that it is a solder issue, and a side effect of the power cable having that right-angle connector. I did look this past weekend and it looks like the Oregon uses a T5 or T6 screw to hold the case together, so I will have to see if I even have the correct driver before I attempt to DIY it. I've been seriously considering calling Garmin, but since my warranty expired almost a year ago, I'm guessing that it will cost a bit to get this fixed. If I brave it, I'll let you know, and maybe discuss it over some cobbler.

South Carolina? Are you in the area impacted by the FAA advisory that was recently discussed? It is possible that you are just a victim of some Government/military testing going on...

Yeah, the "ignore logs before..." is also the reason why the field notes upload will reject some field notes if you log more than one field note within the same minute. Apparently, the logic looks at the time of the last note uploaded and if a new note being uploaded is not newer (ie within the same minute) it is ignored. This is being an issue for some people who are hitting some of the "power trails" especially the 1K caches in NV (USA).

I've used the Garmin Mobile XT with my Windows Mobile PDA and it works great. If I recall things correctly the Mobile XT software is the predecessor to the Mobile PC software you are speaking about. With the Mobile XT software, I have spoken turn-by-turn directions, and even the traffic updates if I have internet access (and pay the subscription fees).

I have seen this on Twitter Recently: It appears that xpunkx (of xpunkx & Julez) had a webinar on GSAK a while back, and you can get it in a screen-cast format now. I haven't seen the presentation myself, but I have met the guy. He did a GSAK session at CacherCon in the Detroit area about a year ago (Feb 2010 I think).

I used to think that too, until I had an issue with a Colorado firmware that would lock-up when loading a GPX file had had a cache with a certain set of criteria. If that GPX file happens to be in your unit's internal memory, you are pretty much SOL on resolving that without resetting the GPSr back to factory defaults. When the GPX file is on the SD card, it only takes a few seconds to remove the card and power the unit back on. Additionally, if you have a PDA or cell phone that can access the SD card, you can easily move files around on the SD card while out in the field changing the set of caches available to you, but you can't do that without a computer if the GPX files are stored in internal memory. Now I ask, why in the world would you ever put a GPX file on internal memory?

The other posters covered things fairly well, but I will add one more factor. If your unit has not had the software updates applied, it could be off by over 70-100 feet. I owned and used a Colorado 300 for a year and I had a few times when I was standing right on top a cache and it reported me to be 70 feet away. A quick (if you could call it that at the time) power cycle, and the GPSr reported me to be 6-7 feet away. After I replaced my Colorado with an Oregon 400t, I had a couple instances of it doing the same. At one point it was over 350 feet off track from where I really was (as compared to my wife's older Garmin 60Cx). I can't say that I've seen it that bad with the most recent software updates though.

When you place eh GPX files directly on the GPSr, the caches become visible automatically, right? Well, if you copy the directory path from the GPSr to the SD card ( "\Garmin\GPX" on Windows ) them place the GPX files into that folder on the SD card, the GPSr will act like it is part of the internal memory. Keep in mind that you have a hard limit to 2000 geocaches or 200 GPX files total across all locations (internal memory on the GPSr and SD card).

I am a strong supporter of Geosphere, but they do not have a "native iPad" app either. They provide the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad release and don't have an iPad specific release either.

Let me be honest, or the last year or so I have been using Geosphere much more than the Groundspeak app, but I have it and do use it some. The Groundspeak app allows you to download a saved Pocket Query into the memory of your device, and then use that when you are out away from an internet connection. It loads these from the Groundspeak server (the same place you go to download a saved PQ to your PC if it has more than 500 caches in it). The drawback is that it only loads form that place, so if you want to get your data from another source, it has to be in a format that can be uploaded to the Groundspeak site. You may (or may not) remember that some time ago they changed the site to allow you to upload GPX files back to their site, and this is one reason why you may want to do that. I haven't tried to do that, so I don't know how well it works (if at all). Using Geosphere, you load data into the app and it is much like having a GSAK Lite on your iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad. You can load many different GPX files (or PQ files) and they can all be searched at the same time. Additionally, there are many different ways to get the data into the device. You can download from just about any web source that you can browse with a web browser (including the Groundspeak PQ download page). Many of the most common ones already have bookmarks making the process even easier. You can load files (GPX and ZIP) from email attachments (using iOS4). You can sync the files to the Geosphere app using iTunes (using iOS4). I'm sure there are other methods as well, I am just mentioning the ones I've used. From my experience with the two apps, the Groundspeak one seems to be more oriented towards on-line use, and Geosphere while it can be used online seems to be a much stronger off-line app.

Well, what application do you plan to use on your iPad to view the GPX data? If you are using the Groundspeak Geocaching app, you don't need to move the GPX files to your iPad, you open the app, and while connected to a wifi network, you can load the files into the app. If you are using a different app like Geocaching with Geosphere, there are several ways to get the GPX data to the app, including email, file shares like drop box & box.net, as well as locally through your sync process. To give any more detail on "how to..." we need more info like "what app?"...

I don't know how many times I've heard that exact statement from different people. Just think, if half the people who say it's not worth going to because no one has listed anything would just list their existing hides, then many more people wouldn't be saying the exact same thing, they would also start listing their caches too, and suddenly, the site could be serious competition for others....

What application are you using n your Droid device to process the PQ? It sounds to me like your application has not properly registered itself with the OS as handling the ".GPX" and ".ZIP" file extensions. I haven't tried the Geocaching app for Android phones, but since the iPhone version supports directly loading pocket queries, I would imaging that the Android version does also. In that case, you would do that from within the Groundspeak app, not y browsing to the gc.com page for your PQ's and trying to download it from there.

The only thing I have found about using my Garmin Oregon GPSr with my MacBook Pro is that Garmin makes it much harder for Mac users to load and use the beta firmware releases. It's not impossible, but you really have to want to do it badly go go through everything you need to load it onto your GPSr. If your husband is the type that wants the latest software updates on his GPSr, then there is always Boot Camp/virtualization to get it on his new GPSr easily

exactly. the only explanation i could come up with as to why it's not possible to delete or edit loaded geocaches at all on the device itself is that they don't want to rewrite GPX files containing the Groundspeak extensions. for this to hold true, they'd have to presume that geocaches and waypoints are always located in seperate GPX files, as they are in PQs. so maybe this assumption is important during the GPX import phase as well. To be fair, Geocache data an waypoint data are not always sent form Groundspeak in separate files. If you go to an individual cache page and download the GPS file there, you will get waypoints and geocaches mixed in that one GPX file. The same is true if you use the "Send to GPS" option on a cache page. Even then, waypoints and the geocache are mixed into a single GPX file. I remember the discussions back when the author of Cachemate first made the claim that they must be in separate files, and Clyde from GSAK corrected him on that. In general, the only way to get the mixed content in a single GPX is to download individual GPX files from the cache pages, but not impossible from Groundspeak...

IIRC, the GPX file does not include the pictures, but instead it includes links to the pictures.

I saw the "hang" issue back when I still had my Colorado 300. At first, I thought it was related to the fact that I work on a Mac (even though it is running Windows natively via Boot Camp part of the time this happens). The problem persisted through my upgrading to an Oregon 400. The one thing that always seemed to work in my favor was that I prefer to load my GPX files on the SD card, so in a worst case scenario, I can pull the SD card, boot the device, then replace the card and startup a second time and it works properly. I generally emulate the same by deleting the GPX files from the SD card, startup the GPSr, clear track logs, etc. then reconnect to the computer and load new GPS files. In loading my geocaches from the SD card, I see that it generally takes about 60-85 seconds to load on the first startup, but following that, it is much faster (half that long or even faster). When this has happened, I have waited 10-15 minutes, and the screen never changed. When it hangs in this case, I am forced to pull the batteries to turn it off, the power switch will not work.

application memory? I have a 32GB iPod Touch and I can fill it with apps if I want. Right now, I have about 1GB of apps (iBird Pro is a big app). the memory can be used however you like, and now that you can group apps into folders, there's more screen real estate for app icons (used to be the limiting factor for how many apps you had). ... I believe you are confusing the two types of memory that they are trying to clarify. the 1GB of applications you speak of it the storage memory, much like the hard disk space in your computer. The application memory is ore like the RAM in your computer, and it is the resource that the running applications must share. My old iPhone 3G had 16GB of storage, but I believe it only has 128MB of application memory (RAM for running applications). My iPod Touch 3rd generation has 64GB of storage, but has 256MB of application memory. My iPhone 4 has 32GB of storage, but has 512MB of application memory. You see as each newer revision of hardware was released, it got more RAM for running applications, so that helps to explain why the newer hardware can multi-task better than the slightly older hardware.

My wife uses a Garmin GPSMAP 60Cx, and her iPod Touch (3rd Generation) for geocaching. We have the Groundspeak Geocaching iPhone/iPod Touch app, but we seldom use it. We tend to use the "Geocaching with Geosphere" app much more. Geosphere is much like having GSAK on your iPod Touch/iPhone. You can't easily use all the features on an iPod Touch, but the basic paperless caching features are great. What she tends to do is to set her current location to that of the cache we are seeking, then when we move a significant distance, she will change her current location again. What I would do was I would set the app to sort on distance from my current target, so that the app would always show caches sorted on distance from the one I currently have set as target. With the iPhone, you just set it to sort on distance from current location, and it shows you the closest caches to where you are now. Also with the iPhone, the navigation screen is handy for getting to the cache, as well as using the satellite images if you have a data connection. Now, I can tell you that if you pair an iPod Touch with a Verizon MiFi it is a great combination, as you have the data connectivity on the go, so you can easily download updated data, and it is a bit cheaper than getting an iPhone. You can get the 64GB 4thGeneration iPod Touch for the same price (or less) than a 32GB iPhone 4, but the iPod comes without the 2 year contract with AT&T. You can then get your MiFi and it's data contract is a good bit cheaper than the monthly contract with AT&T as well. I know several people who have gone this route, although none of them are geocachers, so I can't verify how it will work as a full GPSr replacement.

As RRLovers already stated, the iPhone/iPod Touch doesn't support any bluetooth devices other than headsets. If you jailbreak your device, you can purchase a bluetooth stack to allow you to use your GPSr. Bak in the OS v3.1.2 days, I had done this with my iPod Touch, and then I was able to associate my Garmin GPS10x to the iPod Touch. It worked pretty well, but to be honest, the iPhone 4 internal GPSr is as accurate, and is a heck of a lot easier to use. I would suggest that you consider upgrading your phone before trying to go the other route, but it is possible if you are willing to "fiddle with things" to get them/keep them working. When I played with it, the ROQY software was one f the highest rated ones. I believe it cost me $8 EU, which came out to around $10 USD They had a list of supported devices, you if you are going to consider going this route, I would suggest checking their list to make sure that whatever you buy will work with the software (and if you don't use their software, then do the same for whatever software you do choose).