Paul Monaco .com

What a beautiful day for geocaching, but let me tell you it didn’t start off so well.  Eager to hit the road and made a quick dash to pick up Dan and we proceeded to use a strip mall parking lot as a staging area to load up on fresh batteries and get all our coordinates programmed.  So as I put batteries in my 10-year old GPS unit I notice they weren’t quite snug.  Now this is a problem I’ve had with it for a while now and if the battery isn’t tight it would shut itself off.  So as I’ve done countless times before I reformed the retainer clip that holds the batteries.  Well.. It was reformed just one to many times and it busted.

So… a mad dash to Radio Shack.. old faithfull right?  Wrong.. they didn’t sell any portable GPS units in-store, just online.  Phewie!!!

Okay… at Dan’s suggestion we then ran to Best Buys… BINGO!!!  They had a Magellan eXplorist 200 on clearence for $109.  A quick glance over the packaging and it looked like the perfect little basic GPSing for geoaching.  Or so I thought….

In all fairness to the Magellan folks, once I figured out how to “trick” the gps into accepting a manually entered coordinate it was quite the pleasure to use.

For anyone stumbling on this post in search of the little trick, simply use the MARK function to create a waypoint anywhere on your screen.. then you can edit it to whatever coordinate you want.  Sloppy, but works and at a clearance price it’s a great find for the geocacher on a budget.  Accuracy was fantastic compared to my 10 year old Explorer.

For a different angle, check out Dan’s Blog.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 13th, 2007 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Geocaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.