dsshepard

Please bring back the "old map" overview view. The small maps to be totally honest are really useless. It was fun to see a TB move across the States (or in some cases, across the world).

They are not allowed at Morrow Mountain State Park, however just a few miles East of there are some great caches in Uwharrie National Forest if you like to hike. Look for GCHJFD, GCHJF4, GCHJFF, GCH9B0, and GC555. You could still stay at Morrow Mountain State Park and just drive a few minutes to the parking area for all of these. GCH9B0 has parking coordinates listed in the cache description. GC555 is a very old cache and will take a while to get to as if I remember correctly is about 3 miles into the forest. By the way, I was just camping at Morrow Mountain State Park with the Scouts two weeks ago in the primitive camping area, nice park.

After you synch up there is a menu item in GSAK under File right above Exit "Load Cachemate Logs and finds". After that as someone above mentioned there is a slick macro that automates MOST of the logging process on Geocaching.com. See GSAK help website? for lots of help.

This guy was guarding a cache about 4 feet below it in the woods at GCBC26 South of Myrtle Beach, SC. As I was hunting for the cache I stuck my face about 3 feet from it. It is a non poisonous yellow rat snake as best as I can tell.

You have piqued my curiosity on these hammocks. I am about to pull the trigger on getting one for my son and me. I have a quick question though for those that are using hammocks, where do you put your backpack when sleeping? Especially if it is raining. I just spent the weekend backpacking with the Scouts and I still have a sore neck, the thought of a nice soft hammock to sleep in sounds very appealing.

Could what you are seeing is the circle for the proximity alarm?

I recently went backpacking with my son and originally did not plan on having a fire. In the end I gave in, I could not resist spending the time with my 11 year old son 7 miles into the forest sitting around a fire. He is in Scouts and is very aware of LNT camping (they are teaching LNT now unlike when I was in and was taught to trench around our tents) and I feel we did an outstanding job of cleaning up after ourselves. As the previous poster mentioned we built a very small fire and actually waited until dusk. We also used it cook part of our meal. I can understand the concern and have a backpacking stove. We used the stove for breakfast. We will have some backpacks without fires and some with.

Great idea. I just went and created a similar bookmark. I for the most part wrote off my DNFs. I now see that a few of the caches have been found and gives me motivation to try again. I also noticed that 3 of my DNFs prompted the owner to check them out and they were temporarily archived for maintenance. Thanks for the post!!

I have a 60Csx but had maybe a similar issue with a recent upgrade. It turned out that for some reason "quit" (and maybe "menu" as well) would not work on the Compass page, you had to just page down to get back to where you wanted. Maybe that is what is happening on your GPS. Garmin then more recently posted another upgrade to the 60Csx which corrected this. Try that and see if it works. It doesn't fix the problem but at least you can leave the Compass page. Maybe Garmin will correct it like they did on the 60Csx.

While on vacation recently I used wap.geocaching.com to log a few travel bugs with my Blackberry. I still used my Palm though for everything else.

Thanks!!

For short trips I have a fanny pack from Wally World which holds two .5 liter bottles. For longer trips where we need to carry food, a simple rucksack again from wally world which also holds a hydration bladder. For overnighters I have a MountainSmith Basecamp Series Circuit 3.0. I also bought a matching youth pack for my son. Hey the Green is not bad.

Yes it will take you back exactly the way you came. It sounds like you told it to take you back to a point rather than follow the track. I have used the function a number of times and was quite impressed with how it worked. I am not sure how it works, but it only indicated significant course changes. If the trail slight meandered around it pointed in a general direction. Once you got to a location that had a fairly hard turn, it would beep and let you know you had to change direction. Maybe your track was fairly straight? Just guessing. I did notice that in spite of the apparent smoothing, it would definitely keep you on track (no pun intended). The other thing is that the "granularity" can be adjusted so that may have been what I was noticing. You can change how often the track is updated based on time or distance.

The ability to store 'unlimited' [in size and quantity] tracks to the SD card is there in the options! You may not be able to 'trackback' without converting them to routes. Yes, i know. But i am looking for an option to make 100 tracks visible on the display of the gps. At this time, i have only 20 tracks. If I am not being too intrusive, what do you need 100 visible tracks for? Just curious.

A few weeks ago my family and I were on vacation in Myrtle Beach, SC and of course spent quite a bit of time geocaching. On more than one occasion we either ran into other cachers or other cachers ran into us. In all cases it was pleasant. On one particular cache, my son and I had spent about 20 minutes searching for the cache and were about to give up. Then another family showed up and joined the search. They found it after about 5 minutes and we all logged a find and chatted for a while. I didn't feel bad about not initially finding it and met some new friends. During our conversation we found out that they had found another particularly difficult (at least for us) cache and gave us hint. Mind you it was hint not the location. We went back the next day and finally found it after about 5 minutes. At another cache my daughter lost her sun glasses so we tried to back track in the woods and find them. We did not but ran into another geo caching family. We had mentioned we were geocachers as well. Long story short they were from New York state or Pennsylvania (we are from North Carolina) and had found the sun glasses. They remembered our names and found us in geocaching.com and contacted us. I thanked them for finding them and trying to find us but asked them to just keep the sun glasses. In all we met four different families geocaching during our vacation and never felt uncomfortable and I got the impression the other families enjoyed meeting other cachers as well.

My teenage daughter and 11 year old son don't mind using the two Foretrex 101s I bought at Aldi's for $49 each. Foretrex 101s do have a serial connection (caution though, it is the old style serial not USB).

Yes I know about that feature, but it does not search Cachemate. Sure it does!!! The reason my brother showed me was that he was trying to search for all caches placed by a certain individual and it brought only those up. I showed him how to swipe (copy) any text and it goes straight into the clipboard. Don't try to type the text in, find an example and then copy it into the clipboard. I don't know why that works (maybe there are tab characters?) but it will work. My brother was typing in "Owner: example" and it wouldn't work. When he copied "Owner: example" it worked. Once you have the example copied into the clipboard you can then edit it to get what you want. Give it a try.

Edited for double post.

I have had a Palm for 5 or 6 years and Cachemate for a few months and didn't know that you can search using the Palm's built in Search function (the magnifying glass). Just type in any word (or phrase) and let it go. My brother who has had a Palm for two weeks just showed me this yesterday! I learn something new everyday.

I have purchased a total of 3 Foretrex 101s from Aldi's for $49. None of them came with cables and all were brand new, not refurbished. I ordered a cable from somewhere on the Internet (sorry don't remember where). One I sold to my parent's who are just starting out geocaching, the other two my kids and/or wife use. I use a 60Csx and accuracy is not an issue as they usually find the caches before I do as they are running ahead of me. When hiking or backpacking I will wear one of the Foretrexes to keep an eye on things, and only pull out the 60Csx for an occasional map check. In other words I have had very good luck with my Foretrexes plus you can't beat the price.

I THINK you have Mapsource and the maps mixed up here. It is the Maps that are locked, not Mapsource. Buying a used GPSr will not solve this problem. I have Mapsource installed on multiple computers for convenience sake, however I only have maps "unlocked" and installed on one 60Csx. You won't be able to transfer the unlock from someone else (or to someone else). From Garmin's website: "Q. What if I upgrade to a new Garmin GPS unit? A. As long as you have only obtained one unlock code for a given MapSource product and version, then simply follow the procedure a second time and get your second unlock code. You may unlock up to two units with one coupon code. (see ?What if I own more than one Garmin unit compatible with a specific locked MapSource product??). If you have already unlocked a particular product (and version) for two different compatible Garmin units you own, then you would go through the procedure of purchasing additional unlock codes. We do NOT allow transfer of data when you upgrade your unit."

I own a 60Csx and 2 Foretrex 101's.

I would check with Garmin before loading non standard software. Doing so may void your warranty. Not a problem, this does not void the warranty and ultimately you use MapSource to integrate the maps into the GPSr. I use City Navigator NT for my street maps and the home made topo for off road caching and hiking. They work like a charm. Many folks have used the same process. It is of course time consuming as it can take hours depending on the USGS website to get the data to make one map the equivalent of a USGS quad, but then right now I don't need very many maps.

I have a 60csx and love it. Another option on the topographic maps is make your own for free. There is a very informative thread http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php...garmin&st=0 which teaches you how to make your own very detailed topo maps for free. I have made quite a few for my self and I am very pleased with the results. Plus the price is right.

I have a Garmin 60CSx and two Foretrex 101s. One of the nice features of GSAK is the "Smartname". I have a collection of settings setup for 14 character names for the 60CSx and download to the GPSr. With a simple mouse click have it load another predefined collection of settings and make a new set of 6 character names for Foretrex and also setup GSAK for serial instead of USB. GSAK is very flexible. I briefly looked at EasyGPS but decided I liked the feature set of GSAK. There is also great support from the developer.