Insp Gadget

Does 30 hours of battery life AND a color display constitute enough incentive for you to upgrade? It does for me! I only get 12 hours of operation from my Vista. 30 hours would be great! I kind of wonder about that 30 hour claim. No doubt it will get that kind of battery life with some fancy battery saving mode where it turns off the screen and only takes a reading every 30 minutes or something. I just can't see it getting that kind of battery life on 2 AA batteries. (Or was that 2 car batteries?) My GPS V gets about 15 hours using NIMH with the light off. How can something that has to light the screen all the time get so much better????

I ordered mine the day the info was released from Garmin. GPS Central had it up right away!

Not to worry Farside. I set up an event cache for the 18th. There is a main lodge with a large fireplace and you will be nice and warm! For those who enjoy going out and doing stuff, there are many activities to do in this area. Hopefully we will get lots of people who wil attend!

I'm thinking of setting up an event cache in January. So far I was looking at the 17th. Would any of you show up for a winter event cache?

I like this idea! I'm going to do it starting with my next cache. Thanks for this idea!

I think we are getting off topic here. I heard this "expression" from a good friend of mine when he hit his finger with a hammer. I thought it was hilarious and wanted to share it with others. I guess the question I was trying to ask is: are medical terms off limit? Foreskin is a legitimate medical word, not slang. Would someone be offended by seeing it on the web site? Personally I'd give $5 to someone who could offend me, but I understand there are others who are more sensitive to this sort of thing, which is fine. To each his or her own.

What's your definition of a winter friendly cache? I have been hiding several caches and have recently started to place them in plastic bags and hang them from a tree. I call this winter friendly, but you might have to trudge through 3 feet of snow for a mile before finding the spot. Does winter friendly refer only to the cache itself, or the whole expedition? Should the trail leading to the cache be winter friendly as well?

I was wondering what words you guys feel are taboo to use in cache names or descriptions? I understand that dadgum is fine. I wanted to name a cacle "Holy Snappin Foreskins" but felt (along with admin) that this may have been a bit too strong for this site. What do you guys think?

I just spoke with GPS Central.ca and they said the 60CS will auto route with the new version of the Canadian Metroguide. Apparently the American Metroguide does not offer auto routing with any GPS.

I've done a 14km hike and enjoyed it, but not in the summer! Way too hot! I now want to do a 20+km hike, but find that's too far to go on a hike alone without radio or cell phone contact....

You may want to lay of this tropical topic and see a psychiatrist! Perhaps even a Jamican psychiatrsit?

Well mine came from a combination of my job and my interests. I am actually an Inspector / Investigator and I am sooooooooooooo into Gadgets. Pda's, GPSR's, Laptops, Digicams etc, bring them on! The more techno they are, the more I love them!!!!

And pray tell, oh Grand Poobah, how does one "fool around with the communication methods???"

I shut down visual gps and just tried ST 2004. Same problem....

OK this is kind of strange. I have a laptop and my GPS is connected to Com 1 serial port. I opened Visual GPS and it accuately recorded info from my GPS V and displayed it on the screen. At the same time, I opened ST 2004 and tried to view my position on the screen. No way. When I went to configure GPS, only Com 3 showed up and it said there wasn't a GPS connected to this port, which is correct. Why can one program see this port and the other one can't? Also I opened Mapsource, but can't figure out if it can display my position on the screen. This program was also unable to see the GPS either.....

LOL, I don't think you made a mistake at all, Inspector Gadget. Above all, these things are a matter of personal preference. Very few of us ever completely explore everything that an electronic device as complicated as a GPS receiver can do. I, for one, go for personal gratification. As my better half constantly reminds me, the first thing I ever did with my first Garmin was to run around taking waypoints at City Hall, Fire Stations, Police stations (sound familiar to any of you?) because I wanted to be able to DO something with the thing. Then I went and found some geocaches with it. Only then did I start to realize what some of the other features were for. Garmin and Magellan, as well as Lowrance, Cobra, Eagle, and others make great products. Some of us prefer one over the other, some just want to use the things. I admit one thing, though: I'm a sucker for bells and whistles. The Platinum has plenty of those. Do I need to know the barometric pressure? No. Do I want to look at it? Yup. Do I need the Magnetic Compass? Of course not, I carry a real compass every time I go hiking or caching. Do I like it? You bet! Does the display look less professional than a Garmin's? Yes it does. Do I care? Well, maybe a little. I just want a new toy every now and then. There's blatant honesty for you. To be honest, I am a real nerd when it comes to technicial stuff. Believe it or not, I read the manual from cover to cover several times. I called the guy who bought my MG and asked him to do a search for the cities you can navigate to in Northern NB. There were only 3 listed, Campbellton, Bathurst and Tracadie. There are hundreds more in this area and Garmin gives me 27 cities, towns and villages in a 50km radius. No comparison..... Now if we wanted to go to Caraquet with the MG, I can't just go to the town, but if I know the address in the town, it will take me there,. as weird as that is.... Am I doing something wrong here?

I tried using this service and got an error message saying that the data was too large or something to that effect...

The GoTo got me to Low, Quebec, while I was playing with it today. I think 6 people live there now. ( My dad's home town.) I didn't have the address, because I don't think it exists anymore. Now we need Garmin to redo the GPS V with expandable memory. Or maybe we should all go get the 60 CS....mmmm nice toy. Well I'm big enough to admit when I made a mista.... Hmmm, how do you spell that word again? LOL

You ARE able to naviate to just any city in Canada? I knew it has some major cities, but it seemed you could not navigate to a city that was instaled on the extra maps. Can you go to ANY city or Town?

I was looking at the GPS City site and they announce that they will have the GPS 60CS on Jan 23, 2004! http://www.gpscity.com/gps/brados/2683.2.1...7557/gpsmap60cs

A little bit off-topic here, but would the bear spray have the same effect on a human? I have seen some of the bear sprays used, so much comes out that it looks like a fire extinguisher going off, using that much on a human would really be giving them a good soaking...LOL... During my 8 year term with the RCMP as an Auxiliary, I was trained in the use of pepper spray and carried it each day on duty. The magic ingredient in this is olerosian capsicum (sp?) which was 10% in the small can and it's the same 10% that's in the can of bear repellant. I called a friend of mine who is in the RCMP and he pointed me to this web site: http://www.cfc-ccaf.gc.ca/en/owners_users/...s/bulletin8.asp Looks like it's ok to carry the large cans for controlling wildlife! Woo Hoo! I know that in all my years of being in the woods I have never seen a bear, but it does make me feel a bit better knowing that I have the option if I do come acros one.....

I do a lot of hiking and Geocaching alone and in the woods. There are several black bears in the area. I saw at a hiking store that they sell a bottle of bear repellant, which is basically pepper spray. In Canada, this product is considered to be a prohibited weapon, so I am wondering if it is legal to sell this in a store and buy this to carry for my purpose? Naturally the store says it's fine. I called the local RCMP and spoke to the Inspector in charge twice who said he wasn't sure and would get back to me. Naturally he never did. A forest ranger told me he didn't think so. It seems noone knows if this is a legal product or not. Does anyone know about this product and if it's legal to buy and carry in the woods?

Well I have to ad my 2 cents worth here. In the spring of 2001 I bought a Garmin E-map which I had until June of 2003 when I bought a Magellan Meridian Gold. I only had the MG a few months before buying a Garmin V. As soon as I got the MG, I had this funny feeling about it, that it just wasn't what I was looking for. I immediately found that it was very user unfriendly. It has (if memory serves) 8 different navigation screens where my e-map had 2 or 3. They both gave me pretty much the same info, but the e-map just seemed to do it more logically and I found it MUCH easier to find the info I was looking for on the e-map. What do you need 8 separate screens for?????? Secondly, I felt navigating to another city was so much easier with the Garmin unit. My MG came with the detailed street level detail maps for Canada, which I loved, but it was much harder to get from one place to another. As an example, if I wanted to travel from Bathurst to Fredericton, I just chose Fredericton from the E-map's menu and said goto. The MG was different in that it would not allow me to just go to Fredericton, I HAD to enter an address that I was going to in Fredericton. When your going to a strange city, you may not know the address and just want to have information on how to get to the city itself. I felt this to be a major drawback in the MG. I can only assume the new auto routing feature of the Meridian series will do the same, allowing you to go to a certain place and not just a city or town. With my new Garmin V, I can either input a city or an address, if I happen to know it. Third was the tracking feature of the MG. The e-map would leave a trail wherever I went and did so in an excellent manner, giving me more points when I got on a twisty road and not so many on a straight road. I could easily save the track and return to my starting point, each and every time. Now don't ask me, but the MG was terrible in this regard. The tracks were showing up nowhere near where I had traveled, seemingly to shift on their own. I tried a different MG and got the exact same results. I wrote to Magellan about this and did not receive a reply, which may say something about the customer service they offer. Fourth was the way the menus were laid out on the MG. If I wanted to find a Geocache, I could press Find>Waypoints> Nearest (I'm sure this is not right, but just giving an idea here as my MG has been sold now) and select the GC I wanted and hit goto. If I wanted to delete this waypoint, you had to go into a completely different area to find an delete this waypoint, where the Garmin you could do it all from the one screen, making it so much more intuitive to operate. Now please keep in mind that these are my own PERSONAL opinions about the MG unit. I was very dissatisfied with it and was glad to get rid of it ASAP and go back to Garmin. (My sincerest apologies to Garmin for straying, it wont happen again) After having this MG for several months, I still had to concentrate to operate some of the functions whereas the Garmin was just natural to operate.

Great work Farside X! I'm d/n MIRC as I type this!

This discussion about auto routing brings up a question. Is the ability to auto route built into the software in the GPS or the maps, or both? Would it be possible (however unlikely) that Garmin might release a software update for say the 176C so that it can auto route?