Magellan eXplorist GC

[+januck]

I made the mistake of buying the Magellan eXplorist GC without researching it enough and it turns out that you can't download caches from geocaching.com. I contacted Magellan and they said that they have their engineers working on it which means to me that they are doing nothing. I've tried GPSBabel and MacCaching but still can't get it to load on my unit. When I plug it into the USB an icon shows up on my desktop and I can see caches loaded into the file but when I turn on my eXplorist GC it show nothing. If anyone has any solutions, then I'd really appreciate it.

Edited July 30, 2010 by januck

[+miniwhip]

Are you serious? I just used the "send to GPS" function for 3 seperate caches with no issue. There's a few different ways load caches, but the easiest is to drop a gpx file directly into the geocaches folder of the unit.

 

Might I suggest reading the manual? It's available on my website, or directly from Magellan

 

http://www.magellangps.com/assets/manuals/...serHandbook.pdf

 

Also, how long have you had it for? A mistake?

[+januck]

I've only had if for three days and have been frustrated because I can't load anything. I didn't see anything in the manual indicating anything about downloading from a Mac. It only gives instructions about using a PC.

[+miniwhip]

I see you changed the title to be a little more descriptive. That helps. Try dragging a GPX file directly to the geocaches folder, that's the only option Mac users have.

[robertlipe]

Explorist GC works fine on a Mac. Be sure the PQs aren't zipped (whether you unzip them or whether you just request them not be zipped on the server doesn't matter) and use Finder (or cp or mv or whatever) to move the GPX file(s) to the Geocaches directory on the volume.

 

My guess is you dropped the file into the wrong directory. The correct directory will already have a gpx file with 1000 geocaches in it from the factory.

[+januck]

Explorist GC works fine on a Mac. Be sure the PQs aren't zipped (whether you unzip them or whether you just request them not be zipped on the server doesn't matter) and use Finder (or cp or mv or whatever) to move the GPX file(s) to the Geocaches directory on the volume.

 

My guess is you dropped the file into the wrong directory. The correct directory will already have a gpx file with 1000 geocaches in it from the factory.

 

Thank you for the reply. When I got the GC I deleted the pre-loaded caches because there were none near me. Do you think I did something wrong when I did that? Did I wipe out something? I'll try working on it tomorrow.

[robertlipe]

As we dont' know what you deleted, we can't say ithat was harmful. If you deleted just the single file that was the preloaded gpx, that's fine.

 

Connect the Explorist. Choose "Connect to PC" on the device.

Open finder. Within a few seconds a device called MAGELLAN will appear in the left pane under Devices. Select that.

There will be a folder named "Geocaches". Drag and drop your gpx files (not zipped) to that folder.

Eject the volume by clicking on the eject button in the left pane.

 

**There is a bug that will cause explorist to immediately remount. You may remove the device and ignore the warning that OS/X will give you. But you must soft-eject it once, especially if you plan to remove that cable shortly after doing the copy or else writes may still be pending to the device.**

[+januck]

As we dont' know what you deleted, we can't say ithat was harmful. If you deleted just the single file that was the preloaded gpx, that's fine.

 

Connect the Explorist. Choose "Connect to PC" on the device.

Open finder. Within a few seconds a device called MAGELLAN will appear in the left pane under Devices. Select that.

There will be a folder named "Geocaches". Drag and drop your gpx files (not zipped) to that folder.

Eject the volume by clicking on the eject button in the left pane.

 

**There is a bug that will cause explorist to immediately remount. You may remove the device and ignore the warning that OS/X will give you. But you must soft-eject it once, especially if you plan to remove that cable shortly after doing the copy or else writes may still be pending to the device.**

 

Thanks again for replying. I'm not a tech person so I am slow in trying to accomplish what I want to accomplish. I think I see one of the problems. The files I had dragged into the folder were gs files, not gpx files. I think I did that through MacCaching and not through GPSBabelFE. Maybe I'm not quite understanding what to do on GPSBabelFE. The input file I downloaded through geocaching.com was a loc file and the output I chose as Magellan Explorist Geocaching but I get this message:

 

gpsbabel -w -i geo -f /Users/Downloads/geocaching.loc -o maggeo -F Experiment

maggeo cannot open 'Experiment' for write. Error was 'Read-only file system'.

 

Error running gpsbabel: Process exited unsucessfully with code 1

 

Thanks again for taking the time with this.

[robertlipe]

I am a tech person.

 

What you attempted doesn't even vaguely resemble the step-by-step (that I wrote while successfully writing GPX files on my Mac to a GC) that I wrote. Following instructions will get you far.

 

Explorist GC requires GPX files, not maggeo files. "Announcements" of Maccaching was last updated about 3 years before the Explorist GC was shipping. so don't place too much trust in their directions. Explorist GC is largely unrelated to 400/500/600/XL members.

[+januck]

Oops. My bad. Sorry for wasting everyone's time. Will disengage from further interactions and will just find a friend's PC.