geocaching.karinvandenberg.nl

I was introduced to geocaching by my brother on January 10, 2009, shortly after he started. I found my first cache 3 days later, using my Nokia 9500 communicator phone and a bluetooth GPS receiver. After 5 geocaches I went to LA with a friend and 'infected' her as well. With her tomtom to get to the location and my phone for precise searching we found 10 caches.

In february I got myself a Google Android phone, the G1, with built in GPS and of course Google Maps. A big step up from the Nokia 9500. I quickly bought a bigger battery, quite necessary for a day of caching. For about 16 months I used it happily, with apps like geobeagle and cachemate. I passed 100 caches and got up to 179 this month with it. However, several things bothered me more and more:

- quite frequently the GPS would be off by quite a bit, leading me astray, rebooting being the only solution, sometimes it even needed 2 or more reboots to get the location right. Lately that hasnt happened as much as it did a few months ago, but when it happens it's very annoying.
- mapping is online only, so if you have a slow or no connection at all, you're in a bit of trouble trying to find your way, particularly on longer multi's where you calculate wp's on the go
- battery life - the bigger battery seems to be degrading and i cant get a full day of gps usage out of it anymore

Then of course there's the fact that you can get topo maps on gps's and my G1 phone only had google maps which doesnt help much with forest tracks. Yes, there are other mapping options for Android but it's not easy and doesn't help with the gps and battery drawbacks.

So I finally started to consider a dedicated outdoor GPS. Coincidentally, my father was looking into a gps last month, as my parents go on holiday in the UK every year and go for walks. As he is a big fan os Ordnance Survey (O/S) maps he found the Satmap Active 10 plus, which I hadn't heared of. After some research we decided it was the right choice for them. I helped him figure out how the unit worked and thus got a pretty good impression of it myself. Though a bit pricey, especially when you need multiple maps, it seemed like a very nice unit. Recently their geocaching support got a big upgrade. I popped a small gpx pocket query on it to see how it handled it, and was impressed. It showed the geocaches on the map right away using the same icons as geocaching.com does and from there you could access the description, logs and hint (though the latter 2 take some scrolling). I was really warming up to this unit.

As it is a bit of an investment I wanted to consider it very carefully. Did I really need a GPS? Subsequent geocaching trips told me yes, the drop in battery life really showed, the internet connection had problems and my phone even crashed. All in all it cost me a lot of time and frustration.

So I was going for a GPS. But which? I really liked the Satmap but I was well aware that garmin was the leading GPS brand in the geocaching world. I looked into the different models, and found the Oregon 450 most to my liking. But I wasnt convinced about the maps. After having seen how clear the maps where on the Satmap (dutch are kadaster topo maps) and seeing screenshots from the garmin map options I just felt the satmap maps where so much more readable. I've seen the same thing with paper maps, I have a few bike maps and I can figure out the Falk maps at a glance while the "ANWB Fietsplanner" is a lot harder to read. It all has to do with color choices and such. I don't like the color choices in the Garmin maps, and I'm not sure about the way they're digitally rendered. And the Satmap screen is significantly larger than the Oregon's

Yes, there's more to a GPS than mapping and Garmin's have lots of functionality, but in the end I do feel the mapping is very important. I spent plenty of time already standing still with my phone trying to figure out how to get to the next point and I didn't fancy the same from my dedicated GPS because the map wasn't clear. That combined with many stories from satisfied users in various places, geocachers and regular users, I finally made up my mind: I was going for the Satmap Active 10 plus. Since my dad bought a EU version and had good use for the British one which has better base maps for GB we agreed I would buy a British one and we'd swap units. I had waited just long enough for the Active 10 plus to go on sale as a deal of the week, it was 331.50 the week before and now it was 284.99 gbp. The bike mount was cheaper at 25 gbp than in the Netherlands (40 or 50 euro) so that would come along!

For those of you who have read reports about the Satmap not being stable or it's lack of geocaching support - the stability appears to have improved a lot with recent firmware updates as is reported more recently by users. My parents have used it on their holiday for quite a number of walks (most of which had the pre planned routes in the unit) and have had no problems at all. As for geocaching support, that has been improved much with a recent firmware update, full description, logs and hints are available from gpx files. See my next story for more on the Satmap as a geocaching device.