Need Help With Magellan Explorist Geocache Manager

[+Boogalooka]

Hello. I recently bought a Magellan Explorist 400 and am having trouble with the Geocache Manager. I am finding it hard to make lists of geocaches and then retrieving and adding to a list. Anyone have any advice? Thanks

[robertlipe]

The cruelist, most honest advice I can give for GM is "just say no". But since I'm the author of one of the main pieces of code that circumvents GM and talks straight to the unit, I'm not unbiased. :-)

 

Seeing you're a Premium member, I would just order up PQs that contained what you wanted and expose nothing but those PQs to GM at a time before sending them to the 400. Then it doesn't get a chance to merge everything together.

 

GSAK and GPSBabel offer _way_ more flexibility and power in the way geocache waypoints are stored on the Magellans.

[+CondorTrax]

Ditto:

When I first got my eX600 back in June I was using Geocache Manager and realizd some limitations.

Reading thru this forum I was impressd with all the chat about GSAK and its abilities so I downloaded it, played with it and soon found out how truly powerful it is. Paid my fee gladly and have never since opended GM. The more I've used GSAK the more impressive it becomes. Clyde and Roperlipe have done an outstanding job collaborating and making it indispensable.

 

Download GSAK and you'll quickly appreciate the differences.

[+Jhwk]

ditto the ditto:

Use gsak to slice and dice my caches for different locations. Keep the count below the 200 cache limit and then spit the files over to the 600. Now I just drag up the gs file I need based on the location I am in. Cachemate and GSAK = best $28 I ever spent.

[+kevenh]

Is that 200 limit you impose because you save to the internal memory?

 

Could we save more to the SD card?

 

I have 480+ in two cache file locations on my SD card. Usually with out any issue, but on a recent trip i noticed at least 3 caches were missing in my e600

Haven't started to limit my files to 200 max - yet.

Edited October 24, 2005 by kevenh

[+embra]

Is that 200 limit you impose because you save to the internal memory?

 

Could we save more to the SD card?

Regular POI files are limited to 500 waypoints/POIs per file (although only 200 of those POIs can contain comments). Geocache POI files, with a different format that includes more information, are limited to 200 waypoints/POIs per file.

 

Whether you use internal or SD memory doesn't make a difference with these limits, except to the extent that you could save more files to the SD card.

[+kevenh]

OK, so use GASK plus a distance range filter to break the large databse into 200 size chunks?

 

Is there an easier way?

[+embra]

Yep, you can get creative for how you want to do it. I first broke my large database into quadrants of the compass, which worked well enough. But then I decided to select about a half dozen coord sets to use as centre points for filters that sorted by distance.

 

It's a little tedious to have to go through the process every time you have an update to the main database. But if you look at the GSAK macro page you can see an example of a macro I wrote to load all six filtered POI sets onto my explorist with a single mouse click (see Explorist.txt; if the macro feels a little overwhelming as you're getting into GSAK skip it until you tire of manual operation)

[OGBO]

I assume you first downloaded a group of caches from geocache.com into, let's say, a.loc, b.loc, c.loc (or .gpx or .geo or whatever extension). To merge the 3 of these together, open one, say a.loc. Next click on "File" or the open file folder icon, select the next one, say b.loc. Point to "Append to existing list" (bottom of the "open file" window) and select it. Next click the "Open" radio button, and voila! You now have both lists merged. Do the same for the next file, say c.loc. You can combine various file formats this way.

 

After merging the files, you can edit the individual waypoints (e.g., adding the decoded hint to a .loc that didn't have the hint, or editing the coordinates for a puzzle file to the puzzle solution). You can also enter a new individual waypoint that may not have been a cache (say, the parking location).

 

You can then download to the SD card in a card reader or in the 400, or (if you still have space) into the main memory of the 400, giving the list a new name, or overwriting an existing file. One of the nice things about the 400/500/600 is that you are using a standard file system (Win, that is), not some proprietary system.

 

Since you are using a regular Win file system, you can even edit the file on the SD card or in the main memory directly from your computer with the Geocache Manager.