Morton Fox's journal

Most of the morning was spent calling Garmin phone support on the nüvi freezing problem. There was a hold time of about half an hour. Then one fellow answered the phone and asked me to try a few things. He couldn't figure out the problem, so he transferred me to another department and I was on hold for another half hour. That's almost as bad as Verizon support! Second fellow checked the software and configuration via remote access (Good thing there wasn't anything NSFW in a browser window. :) ) but couldn't do anything either. So he sent me an RMA number and a shipping address. I packed the GPS into a box and went to the nearest post office to ship it back to Garmin. And so, now I wait.

While waiting, I could still go geocaching with the handheld GPS. After all, I used to navigate pretty well by eyeballing that tiny map on the handheld. So I went to Carousel Park in Wilmington for Not just folklore and Hang-Out. I'd been there before, so I knew where to park to get close to the first cache. Then I took a walk to the second one even though there's a closer place to park. It's only 0.3 of a mile. The second cache was supposedly difficult when the foliage is out, but I was able to see it after looking around for a bit.

Last cache of the day was Marshallton Tour. I don't usually do multi-stage caches when I'm on a cache marathon so I save these for lazy summer days. It's a fairly interesting tour of two historical sites, followed by a simple cache in the woods.

( Friday Five )

I picked up a Garmin nüvi 205W at Target last week because it was on sale. The price was about the same as a map upgrade so I figured I might as well buy the GPS to get the map. Of course, my first thought after getting the nüvi was how to use it for geocaching. As some may have picked up from my Twitter, I've been tinkering with it, trying various settings, etc. I took it out on a few geocaching runs to see how it works and to refine the settings. Here's how I set it up now:

After running gcmerge, I have a combined .loc file for geocaches from a number of areas. At first, I used POI Loader to load the data onto the GPS, but I preferred something a bit more command-line driven and scriptable, so I switched to GPSBabel.

    gpsbabel -i geo -f geocaches.loc -o garmin_gpi,bitmap="cache.bmp",
      category="Geocaches",units=s,proximity=0.6,descr -F geocaches.gpi

This command (all on a single line) converts the .loc file to Garmin GPI format. After running that command, I connect the GPS to the computer. The computer sees the GPS as a mass storage device so all I need to do is copy geocaches.gpi over to D:\Garmin\POI, where D: is the drive letter assigned to the GPS. That's it!

After that, waypoints show up on the GPS in the Custom POIs section:


I can select any one of those, hit "Go!", and the GPS will route me to the closest road to the waypoint. (Not always the best way to approach the cache but I can usually figure it out from there.) GPSBabel's "descr" option is the magic sauce that sets the POIs to display the cache name under each waypoint ID. "cache.bmp" is a 24x24 icon I borrowed from Gary Hayman's nüvi tips website.


It's the yellow square with an "X" in the above screenshot. This icon can be replaced with any 24x24 or smaller BMP image but I find that simpler icons look better on the map display.

And finally, "units=s,proximity=0.6" sets a proximity alert of 0.6 miles on each POI. Here, it does nothing other than make the icons show up on the map when I drive within 0.6 miles of the waypoints. It's also possible to add sounds and popup messages but I'd rather miss a cache or two than add more distractions.

It rained lightly today, but there were new geocaches, so in the afternoon, I went out to Mahwah to do Stonehedge. I knew the location because it was in the same strip mall as Moe's, a restaurant to which I no longer go because the cashier slipped up and then had an argument with me. Anyway, I was off my game today. It should've been simple but I started looking in the wrong place and took longer than expected to find the cache. I met TwistedT while I was there.

On the way out of the strip mall, I nearly had a collision with a UPS truck that was going around a corner a bit too fast on a rainy day. I think it's supposed to be "What can Brown do for you?" not "What can Brown do to you?" :)

A news reporter from Herald News was at the Sopranos/Hitman geocaching event and pre-event hike on Saturday and here's the news article. I thought that was a fair portrayal of the activity. Of course, wooded areas account for only a portion of all geocaching locations because there are also urban cache hides, some of which I go for after dark to kill time before dinner, but we don't have to tell the press everything. :)

On a slightly different note, I'm sending the GPS receiver back to Garmin for warranty repair. It freezes up now and then, requiring removal of the batteries to reset it. I made the arrangements with Product Support using their web contact form and I'll mail it to them tomorrow. For the next few weeks, I'll use the spare GPS, which is the exact same eTrex Legend HCx model because I'd planned ahead and ordered another one from Amazon a while back.