Geocaching Australia

I think this was answered adequately by splashy and others in the GC forum you posted on.

I wonder if you could give us a quick outline of what the answer was here.

I did have a look at that thread, but it's 16 pages long and can't see an answer to this question. Mind you I only skimmed through 5 pages.

GC Forum

News for Montana owners. Not sure if you have come across this yet, but I have found the volume of the speaker in the vehicle mount very low and haven't been able to work out how to turn it up. Well I stumbled across how on the weekend and thought I would pass it on. With the GPS in the vehicle mount short press the power button like you are going to adjust the brightness and there will be a second slider for the volume. With it in maximum volume it is plenty loud.

Thanks for the update.

As my Dakota 20 is now on the blink (can no longer be calibrated) and Garmin is only offering to make me pay $307 for a serviced unit with 90 days warranty only (you can buy a brand new Dakota 20 for about $335 from the USA) I'll probably put an order in for a Montana this week. The Dakota will become a backup.

Will go locally though and hope that most of the bugs have now been ironed out.

Cheers!
Rob.

I purchased my Montana from Johnny Appleseed and have not had any bug issues (touch wood) so far.

I got my RAM bike mount for the Montana today. Very sturdy. No way it will come out.

I also had a play with the birds eye satellite imagery. Pretty good, but the contrast of the images is poor compared to google maps, but they are good enough to show tracks where there are none on the topo maps.

For $39/year I am thinking of signing up.

Use google maps instead of birdseye

covert wrote:Use google maps instead of birdseye

I can load that onto my Montana?

I purchased my subscription to BirdsEye imagery with some birthday money and have used it in anger for the first time. I have two things to report:

1: It is totally worth it. With the choice of two spots to head towards to place a cache, using the satellite view I could see that one had a rocky formation and one had nothing so a lot of wasted effort was avoided in heading for the fursthest spot first when heading to the closest spot would have been fruitless.

2: It chews up your batteries something fierce. Don't turn it on and leave it on. I think it uses a lot of CPU to do the rendering and therefore uses a lot of battery power.

Cheers,
Jeremy.

Yes - I think Birdseye is worth it as well Noikmeister. Haven't had the need to use it for a long period of time but would have thought so as well considering what it use to do to my Dakota battery life.

Congratulations on you and your caching group FTF in Namadgi - it made an interesting read.

Cheers!
Rob.

covert wrote:Use google maps instead of birdseye

Is there a parser which can create kmz-files? Same thing for nearmap would be even better

noikmeister wrote:I got my RAM bike mount for the Montana today. Very sturdy. No way it will come out.

I also had a play with the birds eye satellite imagery. Pretty good, but the contrast of the images is poor compared to google maps, but they are good enough to show tracks where there are none on the topo maps.

For $39/year I am thinking of signing up.

I took mine out in it's RAM mount for the first time in Stromlo on the weekend and no sign of it coming out, although the ball mounts did move a little. Well work the purchase though.

I too have the Birdseye sub and whilst I have yet to find a good use in an urban environment, it has more than paid for itself in the 'wild' with the appropriate tracks to follow being plainly visable.

Philipp wrote:

covert wrote:Use google maps instead of birdseye

Is there a parser which can create kmz-files? Same thing for nearmap would be even better

A bit OT but OkCustomMap, or the full OkMap mapping software, from OkMap.org can 'chop' georeferenced raster maps into Garmin CustomMap sized pieces, and older versions of MobAC (if you can find one) are also good with map sources like Nearmap.