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New GPS Ordered... 750 time


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Just ordered a Garmin Oregon 750 to replace my 450. Had no issues with the 450 as it never failed me and seemed to work like a champ. Just wanted newer and better, plus the larger memory helps. Hated dumping PQs to make room for new areas I was going hunting in. Will be here tomorrow. I'm hoping the GUI hasn't changed much and loading the geocaches into it won't be painstakingly painful. Was quite the learning curve back when I got my Oregon 450. Hoping the wireless feature and being able to tie it into my account will make the downloading easier.

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You'll like the 750.. we have the 700 since last August... glonass is the cat's meow and we have had no issues.. used it all winter in all kinds of below zero temps all day long hiking with no battery failure or run downs... we use the Black Panasonic rechargeable...

keeps perfect accuracy just hanging off a pack in the woods ravines mountains do live in..

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Definitely seeing a learning curve with this one. Took a bit to get the blue tooth to work with my iPhone 7+, but eventually got it. Thought the wifi would work a bit differently. I thought I'd be able to download PQs right through the wifi. So far, all I have figured out is the geocaching live which relies on my amazing (sarcasm) Sprint signal paired with my phone. With the memory size of this unit, I assumed I'd be able to load a very large geocache database to it so I wouldn't have to keep creating PQs to add more areas as I travel around and geocache randomly. I really liked the compass/tracking interface on my 450, this one is quite a bit different for sure.

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Just tried a few local finds. Extremely unhappy with this unit. When paired with my phone, my phone showed I was in Europe... I'm actually in Michigan, not even close. Then the device couldn't settle near the cache. Would bounce between <-32ft and 28-> in opposite directions. Not to mention, the GUI is not user friendly at all. I will gladly research the return policy from where I purchased this and continue to use my 450. Unless some one has some answers to these apparent downfalls.

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The Oregon 700 is not the downfall. It is a very capable unit, superior to your 450 in almost every way. You just have to take the time to learn it, and a couple hours after receiving it is not sufficient time to do that! FIrst thing you should do is update the firmware. If you can get the wifi connected to a good internet signal, the unit will find and update firmware itself. Take a few deep breaths and enjoy your new GPSr.

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I thought I'd be able to download PQs right through the wifi.

 

You can download a PQ directly from the Geocaching site. Look for Bookmark Lists on the GPS. I don't have the GPS with me as I type this. I didn't find it myself at first - http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=342897&st=0&p=5633771entry5633771 . Those might be the clicks to do it.

Accuracy for me is excellent. Since it's new, ake sure you calibrated the compass - http://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/oregon7xx/EN-US/GUID-18AA3E92-E306-477D-B1A8-62DE53178289.html

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Yep, updated the firmware. Seems a little smoother now. Will try it again later. Loaded a PQ the old fashioned way through email. I now have the closest 1000 caches near my house. So I will give it a go through again. I did calibrate the compass yesterday as well. I really want to like this unit, hopefully will just take a few days working on the bugs and getting used to the differences in the GUI from my 450.

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I just picked up my new Oregon 700 this afternoon and have already been geocaching with it. I started by wirelessly sending caches from my old 600 to the 700.

 

Now for the question or statement of a problem. I immediately updated the firmware to the latest ver 3.1. I successfully connected the gps to my android phone through bluetooth. The phone was the greater portion of the challenge. I also discovered that a live cache will not overwrite a gpx file saved through the PC.

 

The problem occurs when using the GC Live Download for a puzzle cache with corrected coordinates, the GPS receives posted coordinates. Has anyone else experienced this problem? Am I doing something wrong? Is the issue with Garmin or Groundspeak?

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I'm still having nothing but problems with my 750. After I did the firmware update, it will no longer connect through Bluetooth with my iphone 7. That's not necessarily a deal breaker, but is there a way to load more than 1000 geocaches at a time? Having to keep creating different pqs to load more local geocaches is a huge pain. Specially when the device has the memory to hold millions of caches.

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The thousand cache PQ restriction is Geocaching.com and not the GPS/Garmin.

 

I use GSAK and have many thousand caches loaded and I can send many thousand caches to the GPS at once.

 

There's no way I'm aware of to load more than 1000 caches at a time from geocaching.com

 

I have a 700 and no issues with it beyond the touch screen being sensitive and sometimes going things I don't want when inadvertently touched.

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What is "GSAK" and how do I use that? I would like to load more than 1000 at a time.

 

edit: google is my friend.... geocaching swiss army knife....

 

So how does that work? How does it get the geocaching info from the site to load more than 1000 at a time to the gps?

Edited by punisher911
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What is "GSAK" and how do I use that? I would like to load more than 1000 at a time.

 

edit: google is my friend.... geocaching swiss army knife....

 

So how does that work? How does it get the geocaching info from the site to load more than 1000 at a time to the gps?

 

You still need to download caches at 1000 a time up to your daily limit. Over time you build up a personal offline database of caches that you can search/filter and export to your GPS. Might take up to 2 weeks or so until you had all caches in Michigan download and then you just updates them from time to time. You have 1 PQ that returns new caches and that adds new ones to GSAK.

Depends what you want to do and why you need > 1000 caches downloaded at a time.

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ok thank you. The only reason I wanted to load a large database into my gps, mostly for spur of the moment hunting. I figured if I loaded all of Michigan, or a large area like that.. I don't have to preplan and load the local caches to what area I might be in at the time. As long as I had my gps with me, I could just turn it on and go. Guess it's just mostly out of laziness.

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Red90:

So please explain how to load more than 1000 through Groundspeak without PQ's. The only other way I know is one at a time. Just curious.

Punisher911 has already indicated that the bluetooth link to the Iphone isn't working.

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ok thank you. The only reason I wanted to load a large database into my gps, mostly for spur of the moment hunting. I figured if I loaded all of Michigan, or a large area like that.. I don't have to preplan and load the local caches to what area I might be in at the time. As long as I had my gps with me, I could just turn it on and go. Guess it's just mostly out of laziness.

 

It's not a problem to do but it will take some time and you'd be much more efficient with a 3rd party program like GSAK. GSAK isn't free so you'd need to pay for it. You can download all the caches for a state by go to http://project-gc.com/Tools/PQSplit and selecting Michigan in the 2nd list. Once Michigan is select, press the Filter button and after a few moments a page will be displayed. Looking on the left column of the results showing the 1000 cache list, it looks like you need about 37 different PQs to download all Michigan caches.

 

For each of the 37 listed PQs, you'd create a PQ on the geocaching web site and download it. You can download 10 x 1000 cache PQs a day so it would take you a combined 4 days to download all of the caches. Create the PQ filter name being meaningful such as Michigan Not Found - 2008-12-29 - 2009-7-30 for each based on state and you can filter out the ones you have already found by checking "I haven't found". Make sure the distance is 999 miles or something large to cover the state and then set the Placed During date range to be the dates shown on the Project-GC page for the query you are defining.

 

Assuming you proceed with this approach, you'd just need to run the last one to get anything new. There's a good macro to run in GSAK to send a lot of detailed cache data to the GPS. In addition there are a couple of functions in GSAK to help keep things updated such as a cache being archived after you download the 37k caches.

 

Another option depending on how often you have these spur of the moment caching trips away home is to get your Oregon working with your phone properly. Once you are able to appropriately connect, you could download caches to your GPS from phone for these spur of the moment trips where you want to use your GPS and not just your phone. it works well as I've done this with my Oregon 700.

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You still need to download caches at 1000 a time up to your daily limit.

 

This is not true. GSAK can load directly from Groundspeak up to the daily API limit of 10000. You do not need to use pocket queries at all.

 

Yes, using GSAK you can download 6000 full description caches and up to 10k lite description caches. Just be aware that once you hit the limit you'd not be able to load new caches on your phone, etc.

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Red90:

So please explain how to load more than 1000 through Groundspeak without PQ's. The only other way I know is one at a time. Just curious.

Punisher911 has already indicated that the bluetooth link to the Iphone isn't working.

 

The Geocaching.com menu tab. Or you can use a macro. I normally use the GetCachesOnRoute macro as it is very flexible on area selection, but the built in "Get Geocaches" interface works fine for basic use.

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