Our First GPS:

We’ve started out with a Lowrance iFINDER® GO2 Handheld GPS (we have the International version) and have found it to be a great little beginners GPS, priced at NZ$160 (New) it has all the basic features we were after at the time, in fact more features than we actually needed. The iFinder GO2 (International) has proven to be a great tool for photography (accurately marks our location) which is why we originally got it, and it’s given us many happy hours of geocaching which is amazing in itself considering that at the time of purchasing unit we never even knew that Geocaching existed! A few months down the track we can happily say that we have without doubt got our moneys worth from it and it’s often featured in Andy’s photos… one could almost say it’s part of the family

With a handful of caches under our belt there is one major downside to this unit when it’s used as a geocaching tool… there is no digital compass. Not a biggy as this can of course be addressed by carrying around a “normal” compass, but enough of a downside that when we do decide to upgrade we will look for one with a compass. Another downside, the lack of data hand shaking between the GPS and a notebook / PC but Andy addressed this by building / rigging up a data cable that allows us to download the live data from the iFinder GO2 directly to his laptop… very cool

User Error:

I’m unsure how other couples cache together but it didn’t take long for us to find out that we each had our own habits, routines and personal quirks. Andy’s approach can be somewhat different to mine as with the places we search and how we search, basically we enter a cache site together, quickly skirt around to get our bearings, discuss the options then head off. Andy will often take the lead and I follow behind him, either on the exact same path or taking a slightly wider approach which works well… apart from when the distance between us increases.

The problem for me is caused by the fact that 9/10 times Andy has wandered off clutching the GPS and I’m left bringing up the rear with no clue where I am or how far off the base co-ordinates I am, and as I tend to get easily distracted, a personality quirk, I soon find myself way off course in a very short amount of time. To complete my frustration, and the whole 10/10 experience, the other 1/10 is when I have the GPS in my own hot little hand. To me, the GPS display looks like a bunch of squiggly lines that whilst moving, will occasionally reveal a wee Indian tepe, or part there of.

Matching up the numbers that the GPS throws out at me with the mass of squiggly lines is far too much for my brain to comprehend. By the time I’ve completed a circuit or two of the cache location the once visible tepe is now well and truly buried beneath more squiggles than should be humanly possible to achieve in that time frame. I believe the squiggles can be addressed via the navigation menu but as per the squiggles, the logic of it makes no sense to me whatsoever.

After a few heated conversations later, brought to a head when decided to take on the challenge of Hogwarts – Ron’s Search (Auckland) GC164QZ, I decided I would like my own GPS.. and one that made sense to me.. that being one that was compatible with my own brain… and that comes with pictures

Enter the Okta Touch:

I have an Okta Touch phone (on the Telecom network) which I love! It has a TouchFLO® interface, is running Microsoft Windows Mobile® 6, packs a nice 240×320 screen resolution and provides a 2.0 MP Camera, HTML browser support, Bluetooth® 2.0, external MicroSD expansion card slot. We already had a 2GB SD card and USB Car charger, both of which are proving invaluable but what the Okta Touch doesn’t have, and what prevented it from being the ideal Geocaching tool, was a built in GPS receiver… a major drawback… but one that’s easily addressed.

To combat the lack of GPS functionality we purchased an OnCourse Bluetooth GPS Receiver Edition 3 which solved all our GPS problems but in saying that, it did required some (3 hours!) of tweaking to get it suitable for geocaching.

Basically: the OnCourse receiver that we purchased comes with SirfStar III chip which has a ‘Static Navigation’ option, this is fantastic when you’re driving around but when you pop out the car and revert to walking speed all of sudden the GPS fails to track your movement… not great for geocaching. Static Navigation is turned on by default (which causes the problem), to turn it “off” you have to grab the SirfTech utility switch to SiRF mode, de-select the ‘Static Navigation’ option, then switch it back to NEMA mode… sounds simple but when it doesn’t quite go as planned it will without doubt zap a fair few hours of your time and sanity. Full details on this can be found at the Brighthand.com forum thread A696 GPS not recognizing low speed movement?

End result being: it worked! Our OnCourse receiver now happily monitors and tracks our movement both in the car and on foot which is simply brilliant.

A point to note:
While using my Okta as the perfect geocaching tool, the battery life is dramatically reduced. Okta standard battery life:
Standby Up to 11 days
Talk time Up to 5 hours
while in use during caching, at best we have managed 3 hours on the trot. To be fair, I could turn off TrackyPRO when not in use but I opt to leave it running all the time… enter the USB car charger which gets loads of use while traveling from cache location to cache location.

Settling on some tracking / geocaching software took a little more time. I can’t tell you how many programs were downloaded, installed, dumped, re-downloaded, re-installed, dumped etc.. far too many to count let alone mention. BeeLineGPS™ was just a click away from being purchased, it had the major “pro” of being able to view correctly formatted (PDA friendly) geocaching information and log entries but ultimately the tracking let it down, it wasn’t up to par when compared to TrackyPRO (see our Tracky article), which we eventually settled on and purchased. We also purchased CacheMate (see our CacheMate article) and are running GSAK which stands for Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (see our Geocaching Software article) at home… a perfect software combination. You can read more the software we are running here.

Armed with Andy’s iFinder GO2 and my (now) wee Okta we have spent the last month happily dual caching away at every opportunity possible

“A man with one GPS knows the location; a man with two is never quite sure”