Devauld.ca

Many moons ago, I used to Geocache with a Magellan Meridian Platnum. I fell in love with the sport, and used it to find new and exciting areas when I traveled overseas. It wasn't very long however when my e-bay purchase developed a sickness and could no longer run off batteries, requiring that it be tethered to some other sort of power. I did examine the guts of the receiver, and thought that I could fix it, but the delicate work scared me and never did end up being completed.

Recently I was looking into a new receiver. I had my choices narrowed to a couple when a friend of mine told me about what he thought of the Garmin GPSMap 60CSx. One afternoon I rolled down to GPS Central to examine the units they had in stock, and as soon as I saw the 60CSx fire up with the Topo map, I knew I was going to be making a purchase.

Handheld GPS units have come a very long way since my first purchase. A lot of the functionality that used to exist on the PC software is now built into the unit itself. The GPSMap is able to routefind, manage your Geocaches, create images from your current map as well as a plethora of other features I haven't even discovered yet. The unit is about half the size of my old one, has 3x the battery life and locks into your current location in seconds rather than minutes. The antenna is sensitive enough that I can now get a lock on my position inside my house, which no body even dreamed of when I purchased my Magellan.

The software and community around GPSs and Geocaching has changed a great deal since I last played in the genre. I guess the major improvements are the new free software tools like Google Earth, the availability of very neat and super accurate maps and how seamlessly everything integrates. For instance our little 4.9km Geocaching adventure on Sunday where we dug up GCN419, GCRQTP and GCMVDW could easily be ripped off the GPS and examined in Google Earth like so:

(Click for larger version)

The details really appeal to the geek in me, and I'm really stoked about getting back in the the Geocaching groove.