thcri Posted July 20, 2003 Share Posted July 20, 2003 Two years ago I purchased a Garmin E-Trex Vista. The reason I bought it was because I thought I knew a lot about GPS's. Yeah and a friend of mine told me what he bought so I had to out-do him. Yeah right, his five minutes of deciding what was best and mine ten minutes of figuring out what is best got me the Vista. Not saying I would have bought something elso but I sure wished I knew about this discussion group before I bought mine. So now I have it, lets use Dad's famous words and see if we can fine tune the Vista to my needs. Here is what I mostly do with it. I use it in the car for traveling, I like the exit features to tell me what is up ahead. I like making waypoints of places I have been and really love. I use it on my ATV when out in the woods. And last I now have taken an interest in Geo-Caching. My frustrations are when Geo-Caching and using the Go-To feature it will point to the direction I am suppose to head. Such as 20 feet to the north. As soon as I start heading to the north maybe by 2 or 3 feet it will tell me that I have to go south 5 feet? Yes I am under trees, so is this normal when under trees? But I have found this trouble even when I am in the open. Is there a good set-up to use to make this more accurate. I have set out on 4 caches so far. Two I have found pretty easy but the hints have helped me more than anything. In other words I get close then use the hints to get to where I need to be. One Cache was awful tough and today I was on one that was a 1 and a 1 and I could not find it. It was suppose to be under a log, I found a log but nothing was under it. Today I did have some tree cover but really struggled with the GPS sending me in a direction only to tell me I am going the wrong way. I have this GPS and really don't want to spend the money on another one and if someone out there has the Vista and found a great way to set it up it would be appreciated. murph Quote Link to comment
+Bilbowolf Posted July 23, 2003 Share Posted July 23, 2003 It has nothing to do with your unit. You are encountering the jumpy GPS coords thing. Our units are just not accurate to one foot; about 9 is the best it gets. So once you get very close to a cache it is time tu use common sense to hunt it down. Quote Link to comment
CachinChamps Posted July 23, 2003 Share Posted July 23, 2003 Mine too on occasions when first starting out with the “Go To” feature will indicate the complete opposite direction. It seems to happen mostly in the car and when I am about to lose my signal. Once you get in the area of a cache it is as Bilbowolf said, you have to do some looking. I can usually get within 4-6 feet of a cache before my compass starts spinning. --- If a man says something in the woods, and there are no women around, is he still wrong? Quote Link to comment
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