Geocaching Australia

Who on here has ever had their Garmin or Tom Tom fail within 2 years from purchase.
There might be some models to stay away from.
Nothing out there is going to be 100% reliable

The Swaggies wrote:

PesceVerde wrote:The Swaggies, Much too often on another website, someone posts that their new Chinese no-name GPSr doesn't work.

Hi PesceVerde, what website are you referring too. PM me if you like!

Thanks

Hello.
PM sent.

Skippy wrote:Who on here has ever had their Garmin or Tom Tom fail within 2 years from purchase.
There might be some models to stay away from.
Nothing out there is going to be 100% reliable

Thanks Skippy, I am still interested in seeing your set-up when next time you venture over here as I am interested in replacing the bulky netbook, extra cables and GPS18 for something a bit smaller.

No Problems , will let you know b4 I drive over the border

I have a Nuvi 500 which I used for a couple of years. I also have a GPS62S which is new. I use both in different situations. A friend has a hand held GPS and is wanting to purchase an in car GPS which is also Geocaching friendly. Is there a newer garmin in car that is also geocaching friendly? I had a look at Johnny Appleseed but couldn't see any models other than the Nuvi 500 which stated in the specs that they were caching friendly.

Suggestions please!

I bought a Nuvi 1390 to take overseas and it did a good job, so no doubt the 1490 would do just as well/better. As a handheld it was pretty poor, but allowed me to grab a handful of caches after my Oregon bit the cobblestones... At the time, I got it with lifetime map updates which was a bonus as it might be my fallback if my in-car GPS can't get updates. It will takes a micro-SD card and works with openmtbmap.org Open Street Maps (but not necessarily with full address search or routing)

I had hoped that the Europe map I bought would also work with my Oregon but Garmin stopped the option for multi-device maps... At least the OSM maps work on both devices with a single download though.

Renroc wrote: Is there a newer garmin in car that is also geocaching friendly? I had a look at Johnny Appleseed but couldn't see any models other than the Nuvi 500 which stated in the specs that they were caching friendly.

Suggestions please!

Well the 1450T is kinda geocaching friendly in that you can load in the caches but at this stage it only loads them in using the GC number and not the cache name which I prefer. Mind you I only regard this as a car GPS and not one I would take walkabout. For that I use others.

I mainly bought this because of the free map updates and not so much its geocaching ability. I think you were right though, the Nuvi 500 is the only one that is Geocache Friendly.

When I saw it realised I had wondered if the new Garmin Montana might make a good car/caching GPS, but I think it lacks voice which is vital for in car use... And for the price you can get a Nuvi *and* an Oregon and have the best of both worlds!

Just a different way of thinking - we primarily use a Garmin Colorado 300, however we have more and more been using our Samsung Galaxy Tab for Geocaching. Driving from South Australia to Victoria over Christmas (and back) we used Google Navigation and it was nothing short of brilliant, and when we go on caching runs, we use one of many apps to find caches, mainly c:geo as the map live updates with caches as you drive along - there is heaps of others (ask craigrat).

It comes in handy when trying to solve a puzzle on the fly, plus I do all my logging from it. We have tried a iPad2 from work, but gave up as there was no real benefit that we got over using the iPhones.

Personally, I wouldn't purchase another car navigation device, as my tablet does all that plus more (however you do need to consider mobile coverage if you go country caching etc..). It probably isn't as accurate as a dedicated GPS, but for the few times we don't have the Colorado it gets us within 5-10m which is normally good enough.

There is the downside of running cost for data however - but I'm lucky enough to use work's mobile broadband SIM for that.

Just thought I'd mention it in case you hadn't considered it.

quiet1_au wrote:When I saw it realised I had wondered if the new Garmin Montana might make a good car/caching GPS, but I think it lacks voice which is vital for in car use... And for the price you can get a Nuvi *and* an Oregon and have the best of both worlds!

Doesn't the Montana have voice when it's in the cradle

The Montana has all the nuvi voices available when mounted in the car cradle (contains the speaker).