I have a delorme pn-40 and with a plugin I can load caches into it straight from geocache site. The pn-40 is not for everyone but it does what I want very well. Coupled with delorme's $30/yr imagery download I have imagery, that displays on the pn-40 in real time, for the entire State of WA, parts of OR, ID, MT, FL, NE, CO, ...etc etc where ever I'm interested. Its kind of like having google maps with you.
But...and this is a big but, if you also want the gps for use like a tom-tom (in city gps) this is probably not the unit for you.
While it does that stuff fine once you set it up, getting the data loaded and accessing it through its in-unit menu's can be a serious click fest and even then I get a lot of 'route calculation error' when trying on the fly route creation. If I do it in the computer software and then transfer it to the handheld it works just fine. The key is knowing where you're going to be and preloading teh right data.
One of the best features that I like are the logs it makes of where I've been. I can fire up the software and see everywhere I've been in the rig and I've found it to be very accurate.
They had an update where they added a lot of geocaching menus to the in-unit screens but I didn't get interested in that until late summer/fall and just haven't had a lot of chance to use it. I did use it to find a couple (my first) cache's and it was a lot of fun. Apparently one of the strengths of delormes update is that they also download the hints/text of the caches that most of the other hand held users have to copy to paper to take along. As far as using the unit to find cache's it was great with a simple arrow pointing to the general area of the cache. After all part of the fun of geocaching is finding it's hiding spot, not necessarily using the gps to take you right on top of it. The first one we found was an old ammo can hidden under some brush, the gps took us within 7ft, however the coords are only as good as the person's gps who created the cache. Sometimes in the comments you'll find people show 'adjusted' coords but usually it's only a matter of 20ft or so. I think anything that shows you coords is good enough for geocaching, anything else just helps to declutter what you have to carry. I say that since most coords on geocaching.com can be viewed in multiple coord systems.
Go check them out on delorme's site; here's a couple links that might help
Delorme blog: blog.delorme.com/ Map Library for imagery : shop.delorme.com/OA_HTML/DELibeCCtdItemDetail.jsp Forums : forum.delorme.com/index.php geocaching : www.geocaching.com/ |