Geocaching

Geocaching a sport/adventure game for people who use GPS units. The idea is to have people hide caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the www.geocaching.com website. You can use the location coordinates to find the hidden caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

Hardware

Currently, for Geocaching, we use the Garmin eTrex Vista. I like this unit because it's relatively cheap, easy to use, not bulky, plenty of memory, and just enough gadgets. It's easy to read outdoors but is really only very useful as a hiking guide and a Geocaching tool but only marginally useful as a vehicle navigation aide. It does work well enough to tell you where you are but as for street-by-street directions you'll need to accompany this with other software that does that for you. The battery consumption on units like this that have AA's you'll want to get a few pairs of rechargables, that will save you a lot of money. The main difference between the Vista and the Legend is the memory and the barometric altimeter for measuring altitude.

Software

When we go Geocaching we typically use:

• EasyGPS: This software is handy to send waypoints from GPX files to your GPSr.
• Garmin Mapsource: The mapping software you can use with Garmin GPS units.
• GPX Spinner: This software converts GPX files to HTML for use with Plucker.
• Plucker: This software is used to upload the GPX data to your Palm pilot.

Maps

There is a great site GPSVisualizer.com that has come great tools to plot your saved tracks and GPS data to profiles and maps. Here is an example of a trip from Vancouver, WA to Bend, OR: