geocaching.karinvandenberg.nl

Well, it's here. My Satmap Active 10 plus! The first dedicated gps for me after using my Google G1 phone.

Before I tell you about geocaching on the Satmap I'll just show you a couple of mapping screenshots from the Netherlands South 1:25k card.

These are straight from my device. It has a very nice function that lets you take screenshots at any time of any screen (press and hold the backlight boost button). So this is what the map actually looks like.

Satmap has only recently added real support for geocaching to the Active 10's firmware. Because of that you don't find a lot of info (or outdated info saying it has little or no support) about geocaching on the Satmap. So I made a few screenshots so you can see how it handles geocaches from GPX files (pocket queries or gsak exports). The pc software from satmap called SatSync can convert zipped and unzipped geocaching gpx files to the device. After that you will see the caches appear on the map - and to my delight, using almost the same icons as geocaching.com does.

As you can see traditional and multi caches have the same icons, mystery caches are blue boxes instead of the question mark geocaching.com uses. The red question marks are question wp's of a multi cache and the red circles are multi cache stages. These icons are used automatically, no need to install them. Not sure if you can change the defaults, i might try to give the mystery caches their question mark icon back but otherwise i'm happy with the defaults.

When you move the joystick to a cache and press down you can access the cache info.

The logs and hint are available by scrolling down.

Unfortunately caches with long descriptions scroll very slowly so it can be annoying to get to the logs and hint that way. I've asked satmap if they can change this somehow. The top 2 buttons have no function in the geocache view yet so they could be used to get to the two, I hope this will change in a future update.

Once I got the Satmap I started trying some bigger pocket queries (100, 250 and 500 caches) to see how it handles them. It seemed to got well at first but with the second file the satmap started to freeze after importing quite a few times. Once frozen the only way to reset is to remove the battery (which is connected with a kind of fragile plug, not pleasant to have to do a lot). After resetting all worked fine and it showed the caches, so it could handle those files but somehow not immediately after importing. I thought I might be able to get around this problem by converting the gpx on the pc using the satmap file converter and copying the converted files on to the sd card directly but unfortunately it seems the file converter doesnt handle caches as well as satsync, the result was standard POI icons for all caches instead of the different cache icons. Not a solution then so I guess it's best to try and limit the number of caches you try to load on the satmap a bit.

Real life geocaching: update

Well, it turned out to be good weather yesterday so I decided to make good use of it with a bike cache and included a couple of traditionals on the way. The cache I picked had fixed waypoints (no calculation on route, except to find the last two points, the key and the cache). I loaded the three GPX files I needed in the Satmap and created a route on the unit between the waypoints. I've been trying out making routes on the satmap itself a bit and I have to say it's suprisingly good, I never thought I'd rather 'fiddle' with routing on the device than using other tools on a PC but it's very well done and easy to use. Editing a rout is a breeze, you either add more points on the end to extend the route, or you can add or edit waypoints simply by 'clicking' on a waypoint (to change the location of that waypoint) or route segment (to add a waypoint which you can then drag to the desired position). It's really a breeze. So much in fact that when I had done all the waypoints of the cache I plotted the route to the cache location and back to the car park on the go.

Something that was more of a problem when biking rather than walking is reflection. When you're walking and looking at the unit, you're more likely and able to hold it in such a way you don't get the sun or sky reflected in the screen. On the bike the unit is fixed in place and you can't turn it round quickly to get rid of any reflection. I've read about a matte screen foil that might help. But though I did notice it didn't cause me too much trouble on the way, only when you happen to be facing exactly the wrong way under open sky does it make the screen hard to read. Most of the time I kept the backlight at 6% and was able to see where I needed to go, only a few times I used the backlight boost button. The LiPol battery held fine for the 7 hours I was on route and was still working a few hours later at home when I put it on the charger.

Now for the geocaching. I had the multi cache description printed, and the traditionals only in the Satmap. I found them all without problems. When getting near the traditional caches I checked the hint on the satmap. It was a lot easier to use then my phone, with the detailed map and good GPS lock and directions. The map screen has two 'data box layouts', by pressing the left lower button while in GPS Map mode you can switch between the 2-box and 4-box layout for which you can set what it has to display in the settings. I had set the 4-box to display GPS coordinates, accuracy, Nearest POI name and POI distance, and the 2 box to "Time now"and "Dist(ance) to end". There's 49(!) choices for what to display in these 'boxes'. The map view can be toggled between "North Up" and "Trail Up", and for the latter there's 2 options, one with the cross-hair & circle of where you are in the middle of the screen and one where it's lower in the screen so you see less of where you've been and more of where you're going, but the 4 box layout doesn't work in that mode because it would obscure the cross-hair.

So far I'm really liking the Satmap, both as a 'map' to use while biking and as a geocaching device. Had no problems at all on the way, everything worked just as expected and nothing went wrong, and even with the screen on a lot it lasted fine on the battery.