Which Pda?

[+John NW]

At the recent Follow the Arrow to the Arrow event we were amazed at the amount of gadgetry that is available nowadays for cachers. From wristband GPS's to all manner of PDA's. We thought with Christmas coming up (and we have both been good!!- honest ) maybe it would be a good excuse to ditch the binder full of paper and replace it with a all singing all dancing PDA. This is where your help comes in...what is a good one to get? What do we need to look for? Which has the mapping software available for them, that so impressed us at the event? Which features can we do without. We are a bit lost in this area with bluetooth technologies and the like so I'm sure there are other cachers out there who would value this kind of advice - please keep it simple - so we can understand. Many thanks in advance John + Carol

[+dysdera]

I have a Ipaq 5550, which has the bluetooth, so I can even use it with my bluetooth GPS and not take my etrex out of my pocket. I also have GPX sonar installed (recently) and an ebook reader, and use memory map to provide me with the OS maps. I consider this to be a true paperless solution. I have had to buty a couple of memory cards, but these are very cheap at the mo ( £30 for a 512). I have tom tom navigator which I use as I drive (which I do as a living) so if a cache appears by the side of the road I can stop and do it. Then I have a little app called ROT13 decode, which decodes the clues quickly rather than by hand if I am using papaer sheets as I sometimes do.

The 5550 is a fairly expensive Ipaq, and is not really required as a slightly cheaper model would do. At the end of the day the choice is yours, but I personally would try and avoid palm powered devices as the software tends to be a little less available.

I have just seen a PPC called the mitac mio 168 which comes with an integrated GPS, but I have no idea how good this one is. Pocketgpsworld have recently done a review of this one which retails at about £220 so this seems like a real bargain on the face of it.

[+Naefearjustbeer]

I have a dell axim X5 which cost around the £200 mark from the dell factory outlet. I use "memory map" mapping software which is the dog danglies as far as I am concerned. I have a etrex yellow (well the wife does) and a lead to connect it to the axim. It is a bit fiddly using it connected in the open but it is ok in the car for navigation and for sending waypoints and the like to the gps.

I also have a 60CS (dogs danglies) gps which is good for road use as it has mapping on it it also has a geocaching mode and a whole host of other things that etrex doesnt.

If I am out on particulary rough terrain I dont like the pda to be too exposed so it sits in a hard waterproof box in my rucksack and I use a paper map printed out from memory map. I can send photo hints and cache info to my pda and make notes about my find at the cache. I am sure there is an easy way to log finds using a pda in the field but I just wait until I get back home.

[+Turkey Trotter]

Check out my post HERE

[+Fangsy]

If all you need is something to replace the print outs of the cache pages then a PDA as simple and cheap as a PalmIII running CacheMate would be all you need. I don't think it would be up to running map software anything more sophistacated that you get on the screen of most GPS receivers, for that you would need something much more expensive/sophisticated.

 

I use a PalmIII xe for paperless now. These are pretty cheap at the moment, you can pick them up for about £30 new plus postage from ebuyer online, or eBay. I get pocket querries once a week from gc.com which I open in GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife). GSAK lets you convert your database of caches into .pdb files and facilitates uploading them to your Palm via hotsync. CacheMate on the Palm then shows you the details, hints and past logs etc for each cache in the database.

 

You could in theory download the details for every cache in the country and store them on there, though the download would take forever on a dialup and longer to hotsync. I've limited mine to the closest 200 from my home which is sufficient as I will never find all of them anyway

 

Good luck.

Edited November 8, 2004 by Fangsy

[+Turkey Trotter]

You could in theory download the details for every cache in the country and store them on there, though the download would take forever on a dialup and longer to hotsync. I've limited mine to the closest 200 from my home which is sufficient as I will never find all of them anyway

I already have all of the UK caches on my PocketPC. I don't sync them thru the cradle tho, it is much quicker to copy them direct to the MMC card then load them directly into GPXSonar.

[+Sue and Bernie]

We followed and are still with the cheap 'n cheerful route that Fangsy has advocated.

 

The hi-powered colour PDA with the OS maps and GPS tracking are the Rolls-Royce (and price) solution. I'd love one but when we sat down and really look at what we wanted it to do, the Palm IIIxe with registered copies of GSAK and Cachemate provided the paperless solution we were after for a very low outlay.

 

Since I personally prefer a paper map when walking about (like NFJB does too), having OS maps on the PDA would be an expensively acquired additional facility.

 

So....instead of flashing out on a hi-end PDA, we bought a hi-end GPS, a Vista C.

 

...and as an aside, Sue & I have found the organiser functions of the Palm to be superb. There are now 3 Palm IIIxe active in the immediate family, each with battery powered modems (£3) and excellent Palm folding keyboards (£4 brand-new). All of these items were bought via eBay.

 

I have no doubt that in the future, we too will opt to fork out for the RR option. Until then, we are extremely pleased with our current paperless solution.

[+John NW]

Thanks for the advice everyone esp. Fangsy and Sue and Bernie. Hopefully by tomorrow we will too be the owners of a Palm IIIxe bought from ebay yesterday. So then we will have to get cachemate and GSAK. Does getting these pieces of software save becoming members of GC or should we do that as well for pocket queries? Sorry we seem to have more and more questions?!?!

[+one4zorro]

John and Carol

 

You will need to join GC to get the full benefits of using a Palm with GSAK and Cachemate. By joining you will be able to download Pocket Queries in .gpx format which you can then download into GSAK and then export to Cachemate. After hotsynching your Palm you will then have all the information you need!

 

BTW you don't necessarily need GSAK, Cachemate does have its own desktop converter. However GSAK is such an excellent program I would recommend it.

 

You will also need a Palm desktop program on your PC, as the Palm you have bought isn't the latest, it may have an older version of the desktop software bundled with it. If you have a reasonably quick Internet connection it may be worth downloading the latest version

Palm Desktop

 

Hope this helps.

 

Martin

[+Sue and Bernie]

John & Carol,

 

This is how we tend to use the Palm and software:

 

We download a different PQ each day (56k modem still in the sticks), each one is centred either on our home or the homes of family & friends. We generate a new PQ if we are going on holiday or if Bernie is working away.

 

As each PQ arrives, We load it into GSAK. This basically gives us a personalised version of the GC.com DB on the hard drive, building up data over each week.

 

When we go a-caching, we usually "user select" a handful of caches in GSAK in seconds and quickly upload them to the Palm, Vista C and SP3 (for the car). This takes only a couple of minutes - and while that's happening, we print out the map for the area we're attacking.

 

If we are going away for a visit away from home, we use GSAK to select a big pile or area of caches and pump the whole lot of them into the 3 units in very short order.

 

To keep the level of clutter down, we normally clear out all the "not found" caches from all three boxes by block deleting them after each outing ready for the next fresh upload of caches. This also makes the subsequent uploads to the Palm much quicker than co-ordinating with existing data.

 

...but you'll find you own best way too...

[+dysdera]

I have set up my pocket queries so that I download 15 over friday saturdau and sunday which gives me the whole country divided into segments. I then download them into GSAK on Sunday evening, and do a filter on there using the polygon filter to divide the country into three zones to make the GPX files a little smaller. These I store on a 32Mb compact flash card which I use in the jacket of my PPC described above. I think I am fully paperless now so I hope this helps

 

Steve