onfire4jesus

Thank you all for your responses. I need to talk to my son about the comments you've made, especially the 'does he want a map or not?'. Then I'll research all the suggestions and pick something out. I haven't had a chance yet to go to the Maryland thread but will wander over there and check that out, too. Steve

My son is being sent to Iraq for his second tour. He has expressed a desire for a GPS unit. I promptly offered to give him mine (hey, I'll give up geocaching for 18 months if it any way helps him come home safely), but he point blank refused. I had actually figured I would buy him a unit specific to his needs. Problem is I'm not sure of what his needs are and he's not familiar enough with GPS units (for that matter, I really only know my GPSr and I'm not even familiar with all the features) to know what the differences are. Is there anyone here who is in the military and even better has used a GPSr in a hostile environment that can recommend particular units or at least features to look for. If it matters, my son is in the Army and is a Combat Engineer. His primary job is to deal with IEDs, but last time he was over there, he spent the first few months "kicking in doors". Money is of limited concern. I'm not rich, but am willing to subsist on rice and beans for some time to pay for it, but I also don't want to pay for a bunch of bells and whistles he won't use. Thank you in advance

After reading this thread last week, I was in Meijers (Walmart like chain in the midwest) and bought a charger that came with two of the new AA hybrids. They didn't have any of the batteries by themselves or I would have bought another pair as a back-up. For now I'll use the non-rechargeables as backup. Have used them several times and I love them. I have not used them enough to compare them to other batteries, yet, but here are some points and answers to questions others have raised: o The Rayovac hybrids can be recharged in any recharger. o I accidently left my GPSr on for 12 hours after a short day of caching and the batteries were down to only about 30%. I will purchase another pair of these hybrids as soon as I find them and have the extra cash in my geocaching budget. I'm sold on them.

Had my first LEO encounter this weekend. Drove with my family from Wisconsin to Pittsburgh for a family gathering. We pull into a park to find a cache there and there's a police car leaving. He flags me down to tell me the park is closed. I ask him if we can go in anyway (I mean after all I drove 800 miles to find this cache - I don't want to leave when I'm only 1000 feet away.) My wife nearly spits her teeth across the car - she can't believe I asked that. I quickly explain we're geocaching. Blank expression from the police officer. I'm kicking myself for the geocaching brochure I printed out last week which is still sitting on my desk back in Wisconsin. So I give him a run down of the basics and explain that there is a cache hidden in the park. He mulls it over and gives us the go ahead. My wife got a lot of mileage out of the story at the gathering.

java script:emoticon('', 'smid_4') :DI received my GPSr for Christmas. Took my son who was home for Christmas from college. We decided to walk to the cache since it was less than a mile from the house. He was fine until we reached the woods and had to do some bushwacking. Being my first cache, I'm still learning how to do this which meant we wandered through the woods for a while. I was so excited when I found the cache, I wasn't paying attention to the fact I was brushing up against the dirt in the roots the cache was hidden in. Got my coat and gloves filthy, but I didn't care. There was a travel bug in the cache (Det. Smart) which thrilled me! My son wasn't impressed and just wanted to get to the coffee shop I promised we would visit afterward. Oh well, I hope to get my three year old son hooked before he goes to college.

java script:emoticon('', 'smid_4') :DI received a Magellan Meridian Gold GPS for Christmas and have been out geocaching over New Years weekend with fairly good success (6 finds including 2 multi caches out of 9 tries). I've noticed however, that when I download a .loc file and look at the coordinates in my GPS, the coordinates are slightly off what the web page shows. Is this a function of the Magellan and the download process? Or is it the .loc file? The downloaded coordinates seem to work fine (at least the ones I found). When I hand enter the coordinates from the web page they are usually off by as much as 100'. However, when I did multi-caches, the coordinates I hand entered seemed to work, so I'm a bit puzzled.java script:emoticon('', 'smid_12') Can anyone explain this mystery to me?