Geo muppetz

Ok this is posted by an Australian. We have 103 find's to date most done with the iPhone .. I have found a GPS to be more accurate especially when the phone reception is crap (note G3 is better that G4 for country area's at this time) Towering Inferno ( Warrnambool Australia ) was my GPS / phone challenge the GPS was loaded with the cache straight out of the box no playing with settings and was accurate to 5-8 feet where the iPhone 5 was 5-8 metres. I have a cache out on a back beach with only 2 find so far and another aborted attempt, phone coverage out there is crap, the first to find used his phone and almost gave up because his phone was all over the place, the aborted attempt gave up because his phone - a different brand to FTF was also all over the place (the other one to find it was with me so I gave him some hints) I did a trip with 2 other cachers me with the phone and one with a GPS after 6 hours of caching (including an hours travel each way) I had used 80% of my battery and that was not using the phone for most of the find's (13) we had that day but we did use the phone to decide where to go next. The major Australian phone operators boast that they have 90% coverage - thats based on population i.e. the east coast and major towns & cities, get out in the country and accuracy will drop. If you are going to be caching in and around town on a nice sunny day your phone will be fine, if you want adventure get a GPS.

Wondering if anyone has suggestions as to which map's are best to use with the Garmin GPSMAP62s for Australia ? I have looked at the opencycle maps and they look ok on a computer and the iPhone and Shonky Maps look ok too. Garmin have Topo map's are these any good - I looked at their road map's, they did a great job on all the little laneway's in my city BUT did not have the main beach road ?? and if there is a road that says Warrnambool then the beach road is it .. and it's Not There ????? Will be using the GPS for caching most of the time but good road maps will handy (like we are holidaying in QLD next week)

They don't. Garmin have a bit of a bad reputation for releasing new models with firmware that has loads of bugs, and then releasing many firmware updates in the first months after release. Both the models you name are mature now, and most of the firmware bugs have been ironed out so they will probably be fine out of the box. In any case in order to keep the firmware up to date you just need to install the Garmin Web Updater tool from the Garmin website (do this once), then plug your GPS into the PC and it will tell you if there are updates available and do the update for you if you want. I've had an Etrex 30 for well over a year, I updated to the latest firmware when I bought it and haven't applied any of the updates since, and I can't see any need to update again as everything I use on the 30 just works.

I find all this interesting reading. I have a eXplorist GC which is absolutely useless for caching, it stopped communicating with my computer (mac air) and Magellan were absolutely useless when we (I have a tec savvy friend) got in touch with them about solving this issue, the GPS really stopped communicating with my computer when we ran the program Magellan sent, my computer did not even recognise the GPS unit was plugged in ? I am looking at maybe getting an etrex 20 or GPSMAP 62s BUT I am not technically minded what I want is a unit thats easy to operate for caching. If these units (Garmin) need constant updating or having to trawl the net looking for updates and information on how to make them work I am just not interested.

KEEP AWAY FROM THE MAGELLAN EXPLORIST I HAVE A GC AND IT IS TURNING OUT TO BE NOTHING BUT TROUBLE. At first it was kinda ok, this is my first hand held GPS (I am VERY glad that I got it VERY cheep - now I know why it was cheep) trouble began when I deleted the preloaded caches the closest was over 16,000 kms away and completely useless to me, now I can't load caches to it, it will not down load my 1 found cache (1 found with this thing). I handed my computer and GPS to my tec smart mate last night a 3 hours later he wanted to hit me for buying this bit of rubbish.... the eXplorist GC is currently listed at $38 on the Australian Magellan web page... even they are admitting this GPS is a cheep piece of rubbish. p.s. Magellan have not bothered to reply to any email enquiry I have sent to them - not even a bite me you dumb ares for asking silly questions. Garmin units are starting to look attractive.

We are looking at buying a hand help GPS, we are still relatively new to Geo Caching and are currently using my iPhone which is not to bad but doesn't like being dropped (like the first time I let daughter #2 use the phone to find the Cache) so something kid resistant is a big consideration, something easy to use as I do not get along very well with technology, we are in Australia, we have Mac computers. I have been looking at the Magellan GC or 310, we are not looking at a big $ device just something basic. Any and all advice will be appreciated.