I am now officially the owner of a GPS receiver! As a nerd, this makes me incredibly happy. Vacation started yesterday, and we swung by my parents' house in NJ today to pick up the Garmin. I spent the last few days going over the manual, so I was familiar with it when I first turned it on. I didn't have any maps set up to copy to it when I first turned it on, but I did have a GPX file on my thumb drive, so I loaded it up and my dad and I made a few cache stops when we picked up lunch.
Wow, this makes a world of difference! My father had his iPhone with him, but my accuracy was much better, and I can only imagine how things will work when I actually get a map loaded into it tonight. We picked up three caches in all of 15 minutes. Two of them were ones that my father had previously found, but I got them without help in no time. The third one was one he had not been able to find, and what we discovered was that my coordinates were about 10-12 feet away from where his iPhone put him... but the cache was probably 15 feet away from that. The accuracy of each cache is limited by the device used to originally make the hide, and this really was a demonstration of that.
Cache number 3 was a really creative hide, though. Great container - the same person who did the KriKat cache I mentioned previously did this one, and it's really inspiring me to put some effort like that into caches of my own.
Well, I'm getting some free topographical maps over at GPS File Depot. I'm loading NJ, PA, and DE in he internal memory now, and once I get a Micro SD card I'll download the routable Open Street Maps for Garmin, so I will be able to get directions right from my handheld and forego the TomTom entirely. I can't wait!
Caches in this post:
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