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I just saw the little segment on techtv's Internet Tonight about Geocaching today, and the whole concept sounds really neat! I've decided I want to get into it and need help on deciding which GPS unit I should buy. I've also got a few questions. -Is WAAS support useful? -Onboard compass or seperate one? -Map support or no map support? -Some people are saying that the internal annenas like on the eTrex have trouble locking on signals under tree cover, true? false? or not an issue? -*winces* Garmin or Magellan? (or other?) Right now I'm looking to spend no more than $200 on a unit (the cheaper the better, but I do want cool features). The unit would be used primarily for geocaching, but occasionally for driving. Any advice, suggestions, or answers you might have for me would be greatly appreciated! Thanks for your time and I hope I can begin geocaching soon! -GammaX

I'm a newbie and I bought a Magellan 330X Mapping, mostly because of reviews I read and the Sam's offer and rebate that resulted in a $200 cost. I immediately downloaded the WAAS and that went smoothly. I'm hooked! QUESTIONS: If I use WAAS and the seeker does not, what have we gained? Vice versa, if the stasher did not have WAAS and I seek with it, what have we gained? Isn't accuracy always going to depend on the "weakest link"? I'm concerned because I occasionally read reports on here saying things like "our readings differ by 100 feet." Since I'm new, I do not know whether that is expected because of tree canopy and buildings and heavy clouds, my technique lacks, their technique lacks, someone is not using WAAS, or my unit is substandard. Hopefully everything is fine and that's just the reality of the situation. If I am patient, pivot for better satellite strength, and give the averaging a minute or so, I get readings that will "move" 25 feet sometimes in the identical spot. Anything I should do differently? Opinions please.......Thanks, Darrell

se the software is easier to use, the computer interface is easier to set up. They seem to be more ahead of the game when it comes to inovation and product design. Right now I'm looking to spend no more than $200 on a unit (the cheaper the better, but I do want cool features). The unit would be used primarily for geocaching, but occasionally for driving. If you wanted one for driving, the III+ or 76MAP would be my two choices. Both work really well for caching too. Light, good battery life, and easy to use. If you don't want maps, the new eTrex Venture is a good, easy to use unit with the latest operating software Garmin is using for about $170. OR a version of the MAP76 called the GPS 76 sells for around $220, but doesn't support maps. Which ever you unit you decide on, I'm sure that you will love the game....enjoy!

When I lost my 12XL (grumble) I chose the Legend and have been extremely happy with it. I got it from 4x4Books.com for just over $200 (comes with PC interface cable). Page says $249, but if you go through order process (add to cart) it rings up at $209.

For about two months now, as long as I've been caching, I have been doing the longhand copy/paste of all the cache data in my state to the memo pad on my PDA. It works pretty well. I tried the Avantgo and it was pretty messy. All I need is the Utah caches, and I guess I'm not savvy enough to make it do just that. Anyway, it has been very nice, having all the info in my PDA all the time, and comes in very handy when I get to where a cache "should" be and have to start using the hints. Beats lugging a notebook with 200 pages of cache notes around, too, Maybe there is someone who has done the Avantgo thing that could help, or something could be done with the website to make the data downloadable to PDAs. I will keep trying with the Avantgo.

For about two months now, as long as I've been caching, I have been doing the longhand copy/paste of all the cache data in my state to the memo pad on my PDA. It works pretty well. I tried the Avantgo and it was pretty messy. All I need is the Utah caches, and I guess I'm not savvy enough to make it do just that. Anyway, it has been very nice, having all the info in my PDA all the time, and comes in very handy when I get to where a cache "should" be and have to start using the hints. Beats lugging a notebook with 200 pages of cache notes around, too, Maybe there is someone who has done the Avantgo thing that could help, or something could be done with the website to make the data downloadable to PDAs. I will keep trying with the Avantgo.

pull down that bar on the upper right, make it say "show all topics" there are 200 or so posts in here, just kinda older..some interesting ones though... c/n

pull down that bar on the upper right, make it say "show all topics" there are 200 or so posts in here, just kinda older..some interesting ones though... c/n

BX, you might want to look at the Etrex Legend. It is a little more than your $200 ceiling ($214 shipped from advancedgps.com I think) but it is the same as the Venture, except that it has the built in base map of the Americas and 8 megs for more maps. I found one on yahoo auctions and got it for $150. In my opinion, the maps are well worth it, especially for driving. Good luck,

in maps. I use PanTerra to download MapBlast driving directions to my Venture, and that combo is all I need to get places. 5- I will be using this unit for Geocaching, MTBing and some light hiking. Also to see where the fishing spots are when we go out on party boats. So is this unit right unit for me for under $200 bucks. I use mine constantly for Geocaching, MTBing, and hiking. (and kayaking and driving and testing the GPS software that I write...) Works great! Buy the $15 handlebar mount. I've owned 5 GPS units so far, and this is the only one I carry with me. It's definitely worth the extra money from the base eTrex if you're going to be using it often. In this price class, you may also want to look at the Magellan 315 (or 320 for marine use). Good luck with your decision! -- Dan Foster TopoGrafix: GPS Software, Waypoints, and Maps http://www.topografix.com

There is a very real world example of why you'd want to tradmark something... Yellow Pages and the "let your finger's do the walking" image is not trademarked... In my area, there are rogue phone book companies that send out advertisements claiming that they are "THE" Yellow Pages and in order to list your name it costs some ridiculous fee of 200+ dollars... of course it's a scam since they aren't the aren't part of the Southwestern Bell telephone directory (who publishes the majority of phone books around here)... and yet they make a killing on scamming everyone who doesn't understand that they're not legit...

OING TO BELIEVE THIS ? As I flew East to participate in Mission #3 I called various airports in search of a chopper and a pilot. I was given the number of Sergeant Bo who had done three tours in Nam as a chopper jocky and now ownes his own Huey. Called Bo and he said he could go. I asked if he had a GPS in his Huey, he said no. Said his armored rotor blades hash up them fancy sattlites and GPS don't work. But, he did have a good old military INS (Inertial Navigation System) that would get us within 200 yards if we could just convert to the right military datum. I said OK, we'll go with INS, gave him my credit card number and a plan on where to meet. 7 AM the next day we meet at Country Club Airpark and plan for our dash to the cache. The Huey is in its original 1971 paint job with only white letters BOSARGENT INC on the boom. Bo tells me it takes 15 minutes to align the gyro platform on the INS and that could slow our departure. Decided to leave the platform up and running until the coordinates come in. Agonizing hours went by as I monitored the net for APE activity. Finally after noon the coordinates were had and entered in the INS. I said GO BO and he spun up the turbine engine but the whine soon died... What the hell? Oh, God, the battery was dead ! Keeping the INS aligned all morning had run the battery down. I ask if we could get a 24 volt jump start but Bo said no, gotta take the battery out to the shop for charging... So much for the dash to the cache. Went to the club to ask about a limo or another chopper. Gal named Julie overheard my requests and said she had some exotic wheels at her place. Gotta get some lunch before we go, starving... Talked up Julie over lunch and found her to be a very warm and moist person. Went back to her place and never left. Decided to go for her cache and abandon the mission... Now I think she may have been an agent of the Ninja... Dave... [This message has been edited by Creator of Geocaching (edited 09 June 2001).]

I did indeed get started from the Trib article. GeoCaching is going to be a permanent part of my hiking program. It has really struck a positive chord. However, putting names and faces to some of the monikers I see on the board will be fun. I am extremely active on one other Internet bulletin board. It changed my life significantly. I don't expect this one to be as profound, but I expect it to be positive. I've met 150-200 people that participage on my other BB. I've made many life long friends there. My other BB only has one other regular participant in Utah, so I have to travel more to see people on it. At least on this one, travel distances are close. Just like my other BB, it is only an interest in the subject that matters. Long time experience is not required. I'm looking forward to a great time and meeting a great cross-section of people who are interested in the sport. I'll be there with my wife and dog.

martinp13, Ok, given that you are not an orienteer, I have to ask: What is your definition of orienteering? There are two typical answers to this question. For a lot of folks who got their training through the scouts or military, orienteering involves taking compass bearings and counting off your paces to measure distance, ie, go 200 yards at a bearing of 123, 100 yards at a bearing of 78 degrees, etc. Sort of a surveying thing. I did this as a kid and never saw it as being of any value. Then there is sport orienteering. This is much more an exercise in map reading than surveying skills. Matching the map to the terrain is more important than blindly following the compass. Using a detailed map, the sport orienteer must make route decisions on the best way to get from one point (a control) to another. Straight line bearings are usually not the best choice. (Remember that Colombus thought that the best way to get from Spain to China was to go straight west and he never got there.) The sport orienteer is always making route choices based on map reading; trails or bushwacking, over the hill or around it, ford the stream or seek out a bridge. Which way is the fastest/easiest/most enjoyable? Having decided on a route, the orienteer finds landmarks on his map and then moves out, clicking the landmarks off in his mind as he goes. Only on long stretches with few distinctive landmarks will he resort to following a compass bearing. Coming from a sport orienteering background, my thoughts on a geocache with a tinge of orienteering would be a multi-stage cache that can not be done by straight line bushwacking. There would be uncrossable obstacles like cliffs, marshes and deep streams on each stage. Of course there would have to be a reasonably detailed map available to the seeker so that he could determine the intermediate waypoints that would circumvent the obstacles. Just my $.02 [This message has been edited by CaptHawke (edited 06 June 2001).]

Well, so far . . . The Katy Trail 174 has been head and shoulders above all of the other caches I've found. We drove more than 100 miles to get close. Then we rented bikes at a small historic town. Then we cycled five miles along the bike trail by the Missouri River and had to find the cache somewhere in the face of a 200 foot limestone cliff! It was a hanging-by-my-fingertips find. Really worth the effort. It's near the town of Columbia in Missouri, which now has a half dozen caches, so it might be worthy of a visit to make a day of it. Paul Lamble

quote:Originally posted by jeremy: I don't follow. So you're assuming that everyone will want to allow people to take their cache information and do whatever they want with it? If so, you're missing the point. Ed Hall's maps were good. I have not read a single criticism of them. I assume most people agree. "Everyone" is another matter. This probably deserves a completely separate thread, but I am concerned about what the database will look like in, say, 5 years. What happens when there are, not 2000 caches in the database, but 20,000 or 200,000? What happens when tens of thousands of them have not been visited in years. Maybe it won't be a problem to wade through and ignore the leftover litter, so to speak. Or maybe today's geocachers don't care about the future, so long as it's fun today. Like I said, maybe such strategic thinking deserves its own thread. The reason I bring it up at all is because I was thinking along those lines when I realized that any historic caches that owners go back and mark as being open to Ed Hall to map, are probably caches that are still being taken care of by their owners. That's good. It doesn't prove anything about the caches not so marked. But, personally, if I had a choice of which to search out, I would pick the ones that I have some evidence are being taken care of. There, does that long-winded explanation make you sorry you asked?

quote:Thanks for the lnk, I'll have a look. I thought that WGS84 was an American datum and did not correlate to our maps here? I use topo maps and find the NZ '49 datum works spot on whereas the WGS84 is quite a bit out. WGS84 was defined by the American Department of Defense and the National Imaging and Mapping Agency, but it is a global standard. There are important distinctions between local geodetic datums and global gedetic datums. For something like geocaching, with its global focus - WGS84 makes a lot of sense. As the GPS system uses a global geodetic datum, which I believe is WGS84, it makes sense to use the GPS units in that configuration most of the time. Our only problem occurs when the WGS84 datum doesn't match with the NZGD49 - I believe there are differences of around 200-300m. Most geodetic datums are tuned to local specifics of the earths crust - that is they are tweaked to a local best fit. However these systems don't scale to provide a good coordinate system for the whole world, which is essential for mapping things like GPS satelitte coordinates, and aircraft navigation. There are a couple of good descriptions here: - The European Air Traffic Control Harmonisation and Integration Programme http://www.wgs84.com/wgs84/wgs84.htm US National Geodetic Survey FAQ http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/faq.shtml#WGS84 NZGD49 does provide the best mapping to the topo maps, but I believe that NZGD2000 will be more closely aligned to the WGS84 datum when it becomes widely used. I believe that one of the main reasons for the development of the NZGD2000 is so that NZ's reference frame is more closely aligned to that of the WGS84. I use the 260 series topo maps, and WGS84 is a pain for them. My solution has been to enter all the co-ords in WGS84, and then switch to NZGD49 datum and NZMG coords, record the NZMG coords, switch the GPS unit back to WGS84 and d mm.mmm. The GPS transform functions seems pretty accurate and I haven't had a problem yet with this transfer. I do it this way as most of the coords I use are wgs84, and the only time I need NZGD49/NZMG are for the topo maps. Hope that sheds a little insight into the various datums we have to deal with! Cheers Gavin

Anyone interested in a very slightly used Etrex Legend. I got one a week and a half ago and find that I would be better served by something different. I've used it for biking once, two attempts @ geocaching, and a couple of times just playing around with it. Still looks brand new, everything works fine, all original equipment, manuals, box included. I'd like to get $200 for it.

Garmin eTrex Venture here. nice little sub-$200 unit and tough as a rock

Does anyone know....if the Magellan GPS 320 will do distance resolution down to the foot level? As in '200 feet from waypoint'. I am in the process of recommending a GPS to a new geocaching addict and I initially recommended the Magellan GPS 315 which is what I have but remembered that the one feature I would like to have on mine is resolution down to the foot. If the Magellan GPS 320 doesn't do this, does anyone know if any of the Magellan's have this capability. Thanks in advance!

I'm confussed about a couple of things. Now, I understand that there are different formats for locations (UTM, WSG, etc.) so maybe I'm just confussing them. This is what I've been able to figure out on my own, someone correct me if I'm wrong. If you visualize the globe as flat, then Greenwich is the orgin, meaning its at x=0 and y=0, so anything to the left of it on the horizontal axis is negative (W Latitudes), and anything bellow it on the vertical axis (S Longitudes) is negative and vice versa...pretty obvious. My question is, what are the ranges in degrees of lon. and lat. I'm assuming that they range from W or E 0 to 180 degrees and N or S 0 to 90 degrees, is that correct? My confussion comes when I see something like this -2.393.91. The way I see it, its E002.393.... its pretty obvious that you can't have a 200 degree eastern latitude because its greater than 180 degrees. But, my problem is that I don't know if 91 seconds as in ...091 or if it is 910 as in ...910, because it seems that GPS leave out zeros in their readings. Can someone clear this up for me? Thanks

Has there ever been a hotter thread in the history of this website - I doubt it! This is awesome! I bought a DeLorme gadget - I can't even remember the name of it now (it's a bad memory) -because I have a Palm 3c and thought it would be cool to use it as a GPS. Hated it. Cords going everywhere, guzzled batteries four at a time, no car adapter, maps were EXCRUCIATINGLY slow, took forever to acquire sats...you get the picture. I had it for a weekend and couldn't get it back to the store fast enough. Was out looking for a way to spend the $200 my dad had given me as a graduation gift - nearly bought a new cell phone (close call) I was talking to a guy at work about my experience with my GPS, he asked me if I'd ever done any "GeoCaching" - "Geo-What?" I said. He told me what little he knew, (he'd never been either, a friend of his in Wisconsin is a 'cacher) and I went back to the store that night and got my Magellan MAP330. Called my brother that night and told him about it, and the next day we found our first cache. That was April 26th. I have since found 26 caches, placed two, rescued one, and I have six more in the back of my Subaru begging for a home.

Is Geocaching becoming popular enough for domain name speculators? Has anyone here registered www.geocaching.co.za (South Africa)? The details from co.za's whois are: 0a. Last Update: Sat Feb 3 07:39:28 SAST 2001 0b. Sender: hostmaster@key.co.za 0c. Posted: Sat, 03 Feb 2001 07:39:12 +0200 0d. Subject: Domain registration [geocaching.co.za] 0e. Paper: 03-Feb-2001 0f. Payment: 04-Apr-2001 13:25:41 0g. Hist Cnt: 1 0h. Inv Number: 139283 0i. Contract: NEW 0j. Coza Version: $Revision: 1.39 $ $Date: 2001/01/05 13:10:59 $ 1a. Domain: geocaching.co.za 1b. Action: N 2a. Domain Owner: Andre Bruton 2b. Owner Postal: PO Box 4203, Randburg, 2125, South Africa 2c. Owner StAddr: 44 Goldman Street, Florida, 1709, South Africa 2d. Payment: 200 2e. Ac/Inv/Chqe: I 2f. Bill/Acct: Key Web Hosting 2g. Mail Bill to: admin@key.co.za 2h. NoDelayWord: **set** 2i. Invoice Addr: P O Box 4203, Randburg, 2125, South Africa 2j. Owner Phone: +27-11-475-6137 2k. Owner Fax: +27-11-475-3279 2l. Owner E-Mail: andre@bruton.co.za 3a. Opp Date: 2001/02/03 07:39:16 3b. CNAME Base: 3c. CNAME sub1: 3d. CNAME sub2: 4a. Adm Contact: Bruton, Andre 4b. Adm Title: Mr 4c. Adm Company: Key Web Hosting 4d. Adm Postal: P O Box 4203, Randburg, 2125, South Africa 4e. Adm Phone: +27 11 475-6137 4f. Adm Fax: +27 11 475-3279 4g. Adm E-Mail: andre@key.co.za 4h. Adm Nic: AB5331 5a. Tec Contact: Lockhart, Peter 5b. Tec Title: Mr 5c. Tec Company: Key Web Hosting 5d. Tec Postal: P O Box 4203, Randburg, 2125, South Africa 5e. Tec Phone: +27 11 475-6137 5f. Tec Fax: +27 11 475-3279 5g. Tec E-Mail: peterl@key.co.za 5h. Tec Nic: PL5082 6a. Prim NS FQDN: ns1.key.co.za 6b. Prim NS IP: 196.2.147.10 6e. Sec NS1 FQDN: ns2.key.co.za 6f. Sec NS1 IP: 196.2.147.5 ------------------ Peter Scholtz www.biometrics.co.za

Ok...with that said and done I am sure that most people don't place caches in areas that reach 200 degree's, and if they do, there wont be anyone finding them anyways I have placed cameras in my caches and left one out in weather that reached -3 degree's and was buried in over a foot of snow for about 2 months. I then went after the camera when it was an average of 70 degree's outside and the day I took it the temp was 83 degree's. the pictures came out like new and look great! to see them go here http://www.navicache.com/photos.html these are the pictures of my "ghosts domain" cache located in rochester, ny. the camera was a single use kodak non flash 27 exposure unit. By the way, I live in camera and film home town usa to kodak. I have many friends that work at kodak as well as a couple that make the film in the cameras, they insist that for what I use it for that it will more than perform when I get it back and develope it. oh! and for the last poster, I hope I didnt come across snide at the beginning of my post. As a matter of fact it's pretty cool that you got all that kodak information, it does come in pretty handy and I am making note of it as well for future use! thanks! ------------------ Quinn Stone Rochester, NY.14616 www.Navicache.com

Ok...with that said and done I am sure that most people don't place caches in areas that reach 200 degree's, and if they do, there wont be anyone finding them anyways I have placed cameras in my caches and left one out in weather that reached -3 degree's and was buried in over a foot of snow for about 2 months. I then went after the camera when it was an average of 70 degree's outside and the day I took it the temp was 83 degree's. the pictures came out like new and look great! to see them go here http://www.navicache.com/photos.html these are the pictures of my "ghosts domain" cache located in rochester, ny. the camera was a single use kodak non flash 27 exposure unit. By the way, I live in camera and film home town usa to kodak. I have many friends that work at kodak as well as a couple that make the film in the cameras, they insist that for what I use it for that it will more than perform when I get it back and develope it. oh! and for the last poster, I hope I didnt come across snide at the beginning of my post. As a matter of fact it's pretty cool that you got all that kodak information, it does come in pretty handy and I am making note of it as well for future use! thanks! ------------------ Quinn Stone Rochester, NY.14616 www.Navicache.com