newbie question/advice re:pda

[namiboy]

got 6 finds so far, with a legend. got some money for my birthday so i bought a palm tungsten e2. my question is: what can i do with it geochaching-wise? is the e2 any good? it's all i could afford any way, but besides the non geochaching stuff i can do with it, what else? any help would be appreciated.

[+Jhwk]

Not sure if you only want to use it for caching, or for "all the other stuff" too.

 

For caching, you really don't need that much power. Cachemate + GSAK will run you about $28 (best $$$ you'll ever spend) and the cachemate program needs very little room on the palm. While you can cache with as little as 2MB in your palm. I would recommend geting a newer (older) model, like the M500 series (500, 505, 515). They all have 8MB or 16 MB of internal memory and plenty of horsepower to run Cachemate with a couple of thousand caches stored...

 

Of course, if you want new and shiney, go with the Z22. It has ~ 24MB of mem, and is one of the newer palm products, but will only cost you $99.

 

The E2 or TX are great tools, if you want to do more than caching. But you are going to pay for it...

 

for more on paperless caching with a palm, try this site.

 

Yay I a geocacher am I

Edited August 21, 2006 by Jhwk

[namiboy]

Not sure if you only want to use it for caching, or for "all the other stuff" too.

 

For caching, you really don't need that much power. Cachemate + GSAK will run you about $28 (best $$$ you'll ever spend) and the cachemate program needs very little room on the palm. While you can cache with as little as 2MB in your palm. I would recommend geting a newer (older) model, like the M500 series (500, 505, 515). They all have 8MB or 16 MB of internal memory and plenty of horsepower to run Cachemate with a couple of thousand caches stored...

 

Of course, if you want new and shiney, go with the Z22. It has ~ 24MB of mem, and is one of the newer palm products, but will only cost you $99.

 

The E2 or TX are great tools, if you want to do more than caching. But you are going to pay for it...

 

for more on paperless caching with a palm, try this site.

 

Yay I a geocacher am I

 

maybe i was misunderstood, and i appreciate your reply, but i already bought a tungsten e2, so i was looking for any advice/tips/tricks. when i got into geocaching i was hoping to just download by hand the coords to my gpsr. lo and behold i bought a palm so i was seeking some advice, geocaching or otherwise.

[+Team Neos]

I'm not really following these comments of yours:

"just download by hand the coords to my gpsr. lo and behold i bought a palm "

 

I am guessing that you mean only that you are glad that you will now be able to have a copy of the cache page handy so you can look up coordinates and punch them in by hand.

 

Did you know that you can use the cable that came with the Legend to put the coordinates into the GPS? All you need is some program that will translate the coords into a language the GPS can understand, such as GSAK, or easyGPS. We started with easyGPS first, because it was free, and my husband still prefers to use it to load caches into the GPS. I use GSAK and Cachemate.

 

Your PDA will hold information about the cache pages so you can read about them while you are geocaching to look for clues or to read the last few logs, etc. You will need to convert the cache pages into something the PDA can understand. With a program like easyGPS, you can download GPX files into your Palm 20 cache pages at a time (then click next page and keep going).

 

To really automate the process, you can become a premium member, and have files of up to 500 caches at a time sent to your computer in the form of PQs. You choose the area you want the cache information from, filter out any cache types you don't want (or look only for those you do want) and get the PQ sent to you. Then you use a program like Plucker/Spinner, or GSAK to put the entire PQ into your PDA so it can be searchable. Five minutes from getting a PQ and I can have 500 caches loaded into the GPS and the PDA and be on my way out the door.

 

What Jhwk was trying to say is that you really didn't have to buy that nice a PDA to do all those things. You could have purchased a used Palm IIIxe for around $25. That's what I use. With its 8mb of memory, I can carry around a few thousand cache pages worth of info, and if I drop it, I can afford to get another PDA like it. I also got Cachemate and GSAK to use for geocaching and I'm still inder $60.

 

Since you have already purchased the tungsten e2, I recommend that you make sure you get a shock-proof case for it, and an Invisible Shield screen cover to help protect it in case you drop it while your caching. You'll also want one of the programs we've mentioned to get cache pages onto the PDA, and you should consider a premium membership.

 

One advantage you'll have with all that extra memory in the PDA is that you can load the photographs that some cache pages use for clues. I dont know how to do that, sorry, but I don't that you can do it with the tungsten models.

Edited August 21, 2006 by Team Neos

[+larryc43230]

maybe i was misunderstood, and i appreciate your reply, but i already bought a tungsten e2, so i was looking for any advice/tips/tricks. when i got into geocaching i was hoping to just download by hand the coords to my gpsr. lo and behold i bought a palm so i was seeking some advice, geocaching or otherwise.

I bought a Palm TX a few weeks ago, and since then I've been able to switch almost completely to paperless caching (you and I both have higher-end PDAs than are needed for geocaching, but they certainly do the job!). My GPSr gets me to where I need to be, and my PDA holds the other information about the caches that the GPSr can't hold. In terms of how to use your PDA for paperless caching, please see my response to a similar previous question for a summary and a couple of links that might be helpful.

 

One additional recommendation I didn't include in the previous response is to buy a hard case for your PDA. PDAs aren't terribly sturdy (especially compared to a GPSr), and a hard case can help prevent expensive accidental damage.

 

--Larry

[namiboy]

thanks everyone. good advice all around.