Just Curious

[Kacky]

I use the Palm also, but with Mobipocket instead of cachemate. For a few blissful weeks I had a Tungsten E2 that I bought new because I had fantasies of doing email and lots of other stuff. But the car was broken into and it was stolen before I could get around to it. They left cash & credit cards, a cell phone and the GPSr, but took the Palm. I'm still hoping they will pawn it or something stupid because it had identifying marks along with the serial number.

Anyway, I replaced it with a Palm M500 that was offered to me for $25.00 by someone from the GC.com forum. Once you go paperless, it is very hard to go back. I get very antsy waiting for paper to print, and I like to take a lot of pages with me so I can pick and choose when I get there. With the Palm, you can take 500 caches quicker than you can print one. I have forgotten how cachemate works, but with Mobi you can't see the hint accidentally. I try not to use the hint, except in Minnesota where we were being competitive.

[Slate]

We went paperless about a year ago and I can't imagine ever going back. I have come a long way from printed cache sheets, printed topo maps, and my Garmin 12. We are using GPX Sonar on an Pocket PC. Download the nearest 1000 unfound caches into the GPS and Pocket PC and in about 5 minutes we are out the door. We let the Garmin 60csx take care of the directions until we get close to the cache area, then we consult the map on the GPS, because the GPS will route you as close to the cache as possible on-road, but that isn't necessarily the best starting point. Once at the cache area I will generally search all the obvious spots first and work outward from there. On traditional caches I generally won't read the hint until I think I have exhausted all the possible hiding spots. However, on park and grab type caches I will often read the hint before I get out of the car, especially if there are a lot of muggles around.

[team moxiepup]

We started out printing pages of caches until..... One blustery day this winter we were at Field of Ouch and had a bunch of pages, we were planning on doing on the dash. We parked the car on a very icy slippery parking lot and then we opened our doors at the same time !! Well the pages went flying out the window and we had to chase them down a very icy parking lot. We managed to recover all the pages which was a good thing or we would have had to go all the way home to print new pages.
We aquired an old Palm which works ok but you have to squeeze the sides of it sometimes to make the stylus work. But it sure beats paper!!! Oh Yeah and we lost the stylus so we use anything we can find that's pointy...sometimes we even use a stick of wood

[WhereRWe?]

Paperless is DEFINITELY the way to go.

And I think Cachemate will work on MANY older, cheaper Palm models, so paperless caching should not be out of the price range of most cachers.

[we3beans]

Yeah, paperless is way cool...I will say you have way more patience than me....25 min of looking, I break out the hint. 1 hour, generally I give up. (I get grumpy easily)

[MoxieMan]

Yeah I am definitely going to need to upgrade soon...maybe for my birthday later this year. It's a bit time consuming manually entering all the coordinates into my eTrex...not to mention the ink I use printing the pages!

[Sabby]

There is a free program at Geocaching.com , "EasyGPS" that allows you to send cache data to your GPS without all that hand entering. It is like GSAK but does not do as much and does not handle all the data that GSAK does. But you can save a lot of time entering as long as you have the data cable for your unit.

I highly recommend GSAK as the program of choice though.

[MoxieMan]

There is a free program at Geocaching.com , "EasyGPS" that allows you to send cache data to your GPS without all that hand entering. It is like GSAK but does not do as much and does not handle all the data that GSAK does. But you can save a lot of time entering as long as you have the data cable for your unit.

I highly recommend GSAK as the program of choice though.

Thanks Sabby,

I just ordered the cable that goes with the eTrex from eBay so I can start using the EasyGPS program. It will make my geocaching life a bit easier. Thanks for the help!

Dave

[MoxieMan]

Oh Yeah and we lost the stylus so we use anything we can find that's pointy...sometimes we even use a stick of wood

ah yes, there's nuthin' like a little New England ingenuity!

[ribnag]

Sabby : There is a free program at Geocaching.com , "EasyGPS" that allows you to send cache data to your GPS without all that hand entering.

I use EasyGPS myself - I haven't tried GSAK, but I have to wonder what it could possibly do that EasyGPS doesn't (well, you mentioned support for more formats, but it perfectly supports the one format that matters to me ). To download waypoints, I literally just have to click "download waypoint", which opens EasyGPS and I only need to click "send". Two-click shopping, to borrow from Amazon's saying.


But you can save a lot of time entering as long as you have the data cable for your unit.

Almost all Garmin units have the same pinout on that funky round connector - From the notch clockwise, the first pin does rx (connect to DB9 pin 3), second for ground (p5), third for tx (p2), and never ever connect the fourth to anything. You can build your own with any old serial cable (I used one from a broken serial mouse until recently), a bag of tiny alligator clips from Radio Shack, and about five minutes of time.

Ah... Here we go, a nice neat diagram: http://www.tapr.org/~kh2z/Waypoint/Connections.htm