Since last August, we've been geocaching with our Garmin Nüvi. It has been fairly (almost surprisingly) accurate for our searches. There were a couple of drawbacks to using the Nüvi for this hobby:
- The Nüvi runs off of an internal rechargeable battery - so our time away from the car is limited to a couple of hours (fine for "park & grabs" or one-at-a-time visits, but not so convenient for hiking through a park with half a dozen or more hides).
- It required "switching" between modes between caches that would require driving, unless we were familiar with the area. There are three settings that need to be changed when we switch from on-road navigation to "off-road" caching.
- The unit is not designed to be used out-of-vehicle (ie, not waterproof, shockproof, etc), so it required a lot of cautious handling while on the hunt.
- While an accuracy of 20' is fine for driving (the Nüvi "snaps" your position to the nearest road when in driving mode), it's hard to zero-in on specific coordinates. We usually would pinpoint "ground zero" by circling a perimeter around the coordinates, and figured out where the center of that 15- to 20-foot perimeter would be.
- The only information that the Nüvi would hold was the coordinates, and the name of the cache (I was able to find a way to have the difficulty and terrain ratings saved into the "name" of the cache when downloaded from the computer). We would have the laptop in the car with all of the cache information stored in an offline database that we could use for reference while out on the hunt.
I used the birthday money that I received this year to purchase a new GPS receiver. I'd been watching this particular unit since it came out last April, and have only seen it on sale once since then. I took my money to Best Buy (not even sure that they carried this particular unit) and was surprised to find the Magellan eXplorist CG on sale! (Someone must have keyed it in to their system wrong, because I had to look at the box to confirm that the eXplorist CG was REALLY the eXplorist GC). With what I saved with the sale they were having, I purchased the two-year protection plan... seemed like a good move given the activities that we'll be conducting with this GPS receiver!
The Magellan eXplorist GC is a unit designed specifically for geocaching, and it addersses all of the drawbacks that we ran into with the Nüvi:
- It runs off of 2 AA batteries, and we were able to get more than an entire day of caching off of the lithium batteries that were included with the unit. Standard alkaline batteries got us through most of a day. It is nice to be able to throw a fresh set of batteries in, instead of having to get it back to the car to charge!
- With a GPS unit for street navigation and one just for caching, there's no more switching! The Nüvi is ready to take us to the parking coordinates, and then we use the Magellan to get us from there to the cache!
- The eXplorist GC is rated waterproof to IPX7 standards. I just looked it up, and that means that it is guaranteed waterproof for up to 30 minutes immersed to a depth of 1 meter. I think it should be able to handle the rain that we occasionally get stuck in! It also has a spot to attach it to a lanyard, and I try to make a habit of wearing it around my neck so that I don't have to worry about dropping it. I've never dropped the Nüvi, but now I don't have to even have the "don't drop the GPS, don't drop the GPS" thought nagging in the back of my head, and we're free to focus on the search itself.
- I've been able to get the eXplorist right down to 0' for most caches that we've hunted with it so far - and it's always been dead on the coordinates. Very impressed with accuracy so far!
- The BEST part about the eXplorist is what is referred to in the geocaching community as "paperless caching". We were using a form of paperless caching when we had all of the cache information saved into an offline database on the laptop (some cachers will print off each cache page, which can use a lot of paper up, and get kind of cluttery in the car if you're planning a big hunt day). The eXplorist GC has all cache information saved on it and accessible with a couple of button presses - from cache name, difficulty and terrain ratings, to description, hints, recent logs and more!
We used the Magellan for the first time last Saturday, and set a record for number of finds in one day. We love our new eXplorist GC, and look forward to many days of highly successful cache hunting ahead!
For those that included checks with my birthday cards this year, I say "thank you" for helping me to get this new toy tool!
