Dakota strange behaviour

[nutwood]

I'm being a bit puzzled by my Dakota 20 and am wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences.
My GPS should have most of the Tasmanian caches on it. I used it on Thursday in Launceston and all seemed well. On Friday I was in Ulverstone, turned it on and the nearest cache was 165kms away. Not only that but there was only twenty or so caches on there.
This morning I was heading NW again so I manually shoved on a few moveables in case opportunity presented. Opportunity did present but a couple of the moveables simply didn't appear on the geocache list. Some did, some didn't.
I've just linked the GPS to the PC and downloaded the Geocache file to GSAK. All 2000 geocaches appear to be there. Interestingly, the missing moveables I loaded this morning are not there so I wonder if they didn't load due to the GPS being up to capacity but I'm still puzzled as to why only a handful of caches are available to me when I look at the geocache list.

[Cheesy pigs]

Make sure you delete your finds from the gps when you load a new file. I doubt thats enough to fill your memory but the little buggers will hang around in your memory unless you chase them out

[mtrax]

Also be careful about the limit of 2000 caches I usually leave a buffer of 100 because if you go over the limit the search behaviour is unpredictable

[CraigRat]

Make sure you have 'Delete old caches before downloading' (or whatever it is called) on the download page so it removes all the crud.

[rudi63]

I have had similar issues with My Dakota 20, particularly when I get close to the maximum number of caches. Not sure if the reason is that child waypoints may take you over the limit, but I have found that if you keep the Number of caches below 1500 the problem does not seem to appear. Also, as stated above, you need to clear waypoints and found caches regularly

Cheers

[pjmpjm]

I'm being a bit puzzled by my Dakota 20 and am wondering if anyone else has had similar experiences. My GPS should have most of the Tasmanian caches on it. I used it on Thursday in Launceston and all seemed well. On Friday I was in Ulverstone, turned it on and the nearest cache was 165kms away. Not only that but there was only twenty or so caches on there. I've just linked the GPS to the PC and downloaded the Geocache file to GSAK. All 2000 geocaches appear to be there. Interestingly, the missing moveables I loaded this morning are not there so I wonder if they didn't load due to the GPS being up to capacity but I'm still puzzled as to why only a handful of caches are available to me when I look at the geocache list.

I use an Oregon 300, which is a similar, slightly older Garmin model. I think the earlier replies may be the right answer to your question. When my Oregon reaches its cache capacity limit, its behaviour becomes unpredictable.

[nutwood]

Many thanks for the suggestions. I think I'm going to give my Dakota a really good clean out. All my significant way-points got accidentally deleted a while back ( and that's another story!!) and the geocache files can be replaced, so I probably need to simply scour it clean and start afresh. What's the quickest and most effective way to wipe this slate clean?

[mtrax]

If you're using gsak then tick the delete option, otherwise you can manually delete the files when you connected to your pc

[nutwood]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm suspecting something is not quite as it should be with this GPS. When I first got it I had a problem where I would manually enter a geocache but when I came to look for it, it wasn't on the list. There were a couple of other peculiarities and after a bit of discussion back and forth with Garmin, they agreed to replace it under warranty. Surprise, surprise, problems vanished so I didn't pursue the offer. It has performed perfectly until now.
I suspect that I've over filled it with caches, as per replies above. I've only entered 500 caches at a time and I've selected "clear GPS before sending" but it's obvious that somehow it's filled up to 2000. I thought I'd take the simple approach and do a master reset (LH top and turn on); this is meant to scrub everything but it doesn't!
I'm now down to doing it manually. Is it as simple as cleaning out the GPX folder or is there more to it? The master reset process above has happily removed all my set up so I've nothing to lose. I just want to clean it out and start afresh.

[Cheesy pigs]

with my Oregon I plug it into the computer open the files folder and delete the file. I assume all garmins would be similar