Using car GPS for geocaching?

[ConfuzdMuch]

I should be driving soon (by next month if all goes well) and I know I will want to pick up a navigation system. But I recently found out about geocaching and want to get more into this. My question is, for those that use their car GPS for this, how useful is it actually? I'll probably be looking at a lower-end TomTom or something else under the $100-$150 budget. Could I expect anything useful out of that?

[+popokiiti]

If you do go with the automotive GPS, bear in mind that away from the car it needs to be in pedestrian mode, it isn't waterproof or as rugged as a dedicated hand-held GPS and has a limited battery life. A lot of people start out in this way, keeping the GPS in a ziplock baggie to protect it, but do switch to a specific GPS later. I am not sure on the prices now, but I am happy with my Garmin Nuvi for the car, and the Magellan eXplorist GC for caching. I would rather have had another Garmin, but the price point was what swayed me.

Don't forget that Christmas (and your birthday) are coming...maybe some money towards a GPS could be an idea later on.

If you have a smartphone, that can be used also, but again, battery life and ruggedness is an issue.

Welcome aboard, and have fun!

[ConfuzdMuch]

For right now, I have been searching for as cheap a unit I can find for geocaching with. ($50 max) and I have several friends with kids that I can get into this if I ever upgrade. Just a matter of finding one... If I canlt before I get the car navigation, I can just test it out with that. Then like you said, can try and get money for a real handheld for christmas. My birthdate isn't tik April though, so about half a year to go on that one.

[misterfonzie]

I sometimes use my Garmin Nuvi for caching in pedestrian mode. The accuracy is hit-or-miss -- sometimes it's spot-on, other times it's far off and getting it to work is frustrating. The last few times I've used it, it's been only slightly helpful, because it generates a turn-by-turn "highlighted route" to the cache using nearby streets, and it keeps wanting me to follow that route ... even when I was in the woods, not near roads, and within a few hundred feet of the cache. At its best, the Nuvi has gotten readings of 4 feet when I found a cache. More typical readings have me at 20-40 feet away when I'm at the cache. At its worst, recently it told me I was 250 feet away when I should've been right on top of it.

[ConfuzdMuch]

How can I find out if a unit has pedestrian mode? Is there a specification that most listings will put or do almost all GPS systems usually have th feature?

[+ecanderson]

I should be driving soon (by next month if all goes well) and I know I will want to pick up a navigation system. But I recently found out about geocaching and want to get more into this. My question is, for those that use their car GPS for this, how useful is it actually? I'll probably be looking at a lower-end TomTom or something else under the $100-$150 budget. Could I expect anything useful out of that?

It's difficult to use even the higher end TomToms for caching, and some of the lower end units (with EasyMenu) are a pain. See this thread about how to use them to get you to the general area, but plan to use a handheld once you get out of the car: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=283519

[+EdrickV]

I sometimes use my Garmin Nuvi for caching in pedestrian mode. The accuracy is hit-or-miss -- sometimes it's spot-on, other times it's far off and getting it to work is frustrating. The last few times I've used it, it's been only slightly helpful, because it generates a turn-by-turn "highlighted route" to the cache using nearby streets, and it keeps wanting me to follow that route ... even when I was in the woods, not near roads, and within a few hundred feet of the cache. At its best, the Nuvi has gotten readings of 4 feet when I found a cache. More typical readings have me at 20-40 feet away when I'm at the cache. At its worst, recently it told me I was 250 feet away when I should've been right on top of it.

 

To get it to draw a straight line to the cache, you need to put it into Pedestrian mode and make sure that mode is configured for off-road navigation. Then it will show a straight line from where you were when you switched modes to the cache coordinates, and show where you are in relation to that line. (You may also need to scroll the map manually, the one I used did not scroll the map in pedestrian mode.)

 

As far as car GPS units go, I personally would choose a Nuvi over other types. There is a macro available for GSAK that can convert Geocaches to a Points of Interest file and keep most of the info like description, logs, hints, etc. The trick is you'd have to be a Premium member to really be able to use that. (There is a way to get a free 30 day Premium Membership trial if you got a Garmin GPS that has not been used to get a free trial before.)

 

IMHO $50 isn't really enough to buy a halfway decent vehicle GPS though, unless you can get one at a garage sale or flea market or something like that.

[ConfuzdMuch]

Actually my $50 budget is for the waywayway older handheld gps units that honestly I wouldn't mind if it were beat up as long as it were usable for a good while still. Obviously, the price would have to reflect the wear of it but still I'd be willing to do that just to try this out.

 

As for car GPS, Id likely go up to $200 on that, even for used but only if it's REALLY good. I'd hate to buy a cheap piece of junk and end up lost because it wasn't reliable.

[+EdrickV]

Other people may have other suggestions, but you could get a new Garmin Nuvi 1350LMT for about $140 at Best Buy. It comes with lifetime map updates and FM traffic info, which is what the LMT means. Maybe add a MicroSD card for extra storage. Maybe get a better vehicle mount then the windshield one.

 

If you do get a Nuvi of some sort, try sending Geocaches to it via the Send To GPS button on cache pages, and see if they show up as treasure chest icons on the map. If they do, you may want to avoid updating the firmware for a while since there's a bug in newer versions that makes all those icons into small black boxes that are hard to see when you are close to them. (Which makes it harder to use for Geocaching.)

 

The lifetime map updates for LM Nuvi models sold in the US should be City Navigator North America, but you can't fit all of NA in the internal memory, which is where a storage card comes in handy. (That's why Nuvi models come with just the lower 48 states installed.)

 

There is one Nuvi series designed for paperless Geocaching, (500/550) but those are in the $250+ range new. And while I think they are IPX7 rated for water resistance, I don't know if their battery life is any better then a regular Nuvi.

[ConfuzdMuch]

So is that a really good car navigation and geocaching? Main focus will be car nav probably, with the geocaching an additional.

[+sailorsam20500]

I have a NUVI 1450LMT. My gripe is that for caches behind say a store, it wants to go into the neighborhood behind the store and then "go off road". With that said, I've learned to look at where it is sending me and check the main road to see if it is a retail location. If I set the unit to off-road navigation, it generally gets me to within 30 feet of GZ. Another dislike on this unit is it's propensity to freeze up. I use GSAK and the GPX-By-Cache-Type macro to load custom POI's to the unit. If there are too many caches in the "sensitivity notification distance" the unit freezes up. Third beef on POI's - why does it have to ask me EVERY TIME I TURN IT ON if I want to save the POI's on external media to the internal....

 

However, a new complaint. The lifetime traffic is apparently tied to the power cable on LMT units. In my case, the USB connector is breaking and keeps loosing power connection and I think it will be compeletely worthless in another week or two. I can't believe Garmin is charging $70 (US) for a replacement!!! And in my mind this problem is caused by poor engineering on their part. I've submitted a support request to Garmin and am waiting for a reply... I've been using Garmins since the GPS 3 days, this may be enough to get me to change vendors on my next unit.

 

SailorSam20500

[+ecanderson]

I have a NUVI 1450LMT. My gripe is that for caches behind say a store, it wants to go into the neighborhood behind the store and then "go off road".

Unless/until (and unlikely) they start mapping every parking lot, that's just how it will be so long as the waypoint is closer to the neighborhood road than it is the road in front of the store.

 

You want a gripe? How about the big malls that butt up against interstate highways? Your unit will dutifully try to start your adventure right on the side of that interstate.

[+EdrickV]

It is a good idea to sanity check the driving directions before you start driving. I was doing directions to a cache at a college near a highway, and the cache location was so close to the highway that it wanted us to go offroad from this big interstate highway. What I did was set it to navigate to a point on a road near the cache, then switch to navigating to the cache once I'm closer.

 

As far as the "copy to internal memory" message, that is annoying and I've been trying to think of ways to free up internal memory space so I can actually do that for my Benchmarks file, which for the state is like 80 megs. For smaller Geocache POI files that actually would fit, I would say do it and then delete the copy on the card. (Benchmark POI files, created by the newer of the two Nuvi macros, are quite big because they all contain the full datasheet for the benchmark, which is quite a bit of text compared to most Geocache listings. It would be really nice to have all 12,000+ benchmarks in the state loaded onto the Nuvi at once though. )