Got a GPS (at last)

Take 3 on this one. My first GPS was some years ago, but it wouldn’t work with rechargeable batteries (despite the store saying it would). But they were cool about it and gave me a full refund. Particularly when they themselves couldn’t even fit the rechargeable’s inside the unit.

The second was the ‘bonus’ GPS that’s part of my new HTC mobile phone. It works okay, but eats the battery. It’s quite accurate. But the battery stuff was a killer for ne. As I said, it was a bonus in the phone and the phone is cheap, so no complaints here.

As I’m doing more bushwalking I decided to get a dedicated GPS unit. I plan to use it not for assisting me get from Wombat Creek to the top of Mount Howitt, but for the logging (recording) of this trip. I still use bushwalking books and maps, but it’s great to have the GPS log where you went. Then you can load it into Google Earth etc and see it in 3D.

Later on I’ll probably move to route planning. I also tried my first Geocaching yesterday.  Basically it’s a treasure-hunt using your GPS. You go to a web site, type in your postcode and nearby Caches are shown. These are GPS latitude and longitude co-ordinates.  And off you go to find the cache.  In fact the first one was like 1km from my house, but had the sea between me and it. However I didn’t look closely at what the GPS unit was telling me to do. I ended up on a thin, long (artificial) point of land that stretched about 1km out into the bay. But I wasn’t used to the GPS and picked the wrong point, so when I got out to the end it was telling me to go 400 metres north. Which was across to water to yet another thin, long point…

I think part of the problem was moving the GPS from horizontal up to vertical and back. Moving it up to vertical makes the GoTo/Compass function (“walk THAT way”) obviously get confused.

Anyway it’s a Garmin eTrex Vista HCx model, which I purchased new from the USA.  Even with the postage it was much cheaper than buying it here. And it took only 5 days to get here!