Bmalzi27 Posted October 4, 2013 Share Posted October 4, 2013 Hello people of the Geocaching world! My fiancé and I are new to this. I work in retail and had a lady tell me all about this. I thought it was neat so I searched what it was exactly and shared with my fiancé. We are planning a trip to our local campground and that's when we want to start this adventure. However, we were wondering if you absoultley need to have one of the gps units that this site sells or can we use the one we have for our car? We don't really have a lot of money right now to spend on that kinda stuff bc of the holidays coming. If there are any decent people out there that can help us, id appreciate it. I have work today so I wont be on until later this evening, but plz help all you can:) Thanks! Quote Link to comment
+TriciaG Posted October 4, 2013 Share Posted October 4, 2013 Welcome! I'm not from the mid-Atlantic, but saw your post. The first day we went geocaching, we used my in-laws' car GPS. It worked, but it was a lot OF work. Basically all it gave us was the coordinates of where we were, and we had to guess which way to go to get more north, east, etc. to get to the cache coordinates. In woods or where you cannot see very far, this was hard because there are no good reference points. Then once we found the cache, we had a hard time figuring out how to get back out - ha ha! Perhaps you know better how to work the car GPS to show you what you want to see. But it doesn't have a good way of saying "go a little more to the left" or "about 100 feet further" as far as we could tell. After that first day, we didn't attempt it anymore with the car GPS (plus, since it was my in-laws' unit, we didn't want to borrow it a whole lot). If you have a smartphone, you can download a free app and start out with that. What I'd recommend depends on what type of phone you have. You can also search the forums here for recommendations on "free GPS apps" or something like that. Quote Link to comment
+stijnhommes Posted October 4, 2013 Share Posted October 4, 2013 I'd suggest starting with your smartphone too. If you do decide to use your car GPS, use the link at the top of the cache page to convert the coordinates to whatever system your car GPS uses. Quote Link to comment
+ItTakesAThief Posted October 4, 2013 Share Posted October 4, 2013 I dont have an Iphone, so all I use is my GPS garmin for my car, sometimes i reset it for pedestrian when walking, been working ok for me.... Quote Link to comment
Bmalzi27 Posted October 5, 2013 Author Share Posted October 5, 2013 Welcome! I'm not from the mid-Atlantic, but saw your post. The first day we went geocaching, we used my in-laws' car GPS. It worked, but it was a lot OF work. Basically all it gave us was the coordinates of where we were, and we had to guess which way to go to get more north, east, etc. to get to the cache coordinates. In woods or where you cannot see very far, this was hard because there are no good reference points. Then once we found the cache, we had a hard time figuring out how to get back out - ha ha! Perhaps you know better how to work the car GPS to show you what you want to see. But it doesn't have a good way of saying "go a little more to the left" or "about 100 feet further" as far as we could tell. After that first day, we didn't attempt it anymore with the car GPS (plus, since it was my in-laws' unit, we didn't want to borrow it a whole lot). If you have a smartphone, you can download a free app and start out with that. What I'd recommend depends on what type of phone you have. You can also search the forums here for recommendations on "free GPS apps" or something like that. Thank you very much! Our gps isn't actually built into the car and has a mode for if your walking whatever distance so it might help. My fiancé and I both have smartphone so it definitely seems like something to mess around with on the gps and phones before we actually go on our first one. Again, thanks so much! Quote Link to comment
Bmalzi27 Posted October 5, 2013 Author Share Posted October 5, 2013 I dont have an Iphone, so all I use is my GPS garmin for my car, sometimes i reset it for pedestrian when walking, been working ok for me.... This seems like something I could try doing with my cars gps. It has a walking mode from what I remember. Thanks! Quote Link to comment
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