Waypoint Alerts Continued....

This is a quick demo of how the waypoint alerts work. Once you have everything uploaded to your Garmin, go out and start driving somewhere! It doesn't matter where you go - if any cache in your Nuvi is within the distance you set, you WILL get an alert (and a little ding) just like this!

 

If you press the "speaker with lips" on the left, you'll see all the caches nearby!

 

Any selecting the one you want will bring up it's information and allow you to route directly to it. How sweet is that!?

 

 

Advanced Searching

We're not done yet. Say you're sitting in the car and you decide that you want to do a geocache, but you don't want to do say a long multi stage one. Here's a quick way to search for just the type of cache you're interested in:

Go back to the list of geocaches in your Nuvi. And click the spell icon at the bottom.

For this example, I'm only interested in getting a traditional cache, but the principle works for a "MUL"ti stage, or an "UNK"own cache etc.

I type the words TRA into the box and click done.

 

And here we have all the traditional caches closest to me! Perfect! Remember to note whether or not you've found them by looking at the Y or N after the cache type in the name. As you can see here I had to go to the second page before I found one I hadn't been to before.

(Of course I could have searched for TRA/N and that would have shown me only the ones I haven't found)

Also do you notice the warning about a cache that is Temporary Unavailable, well that's just saved me a wasted trip! Nice one.

 

Advanced finding at the Cache Location

When you arrive at your cache site, and just before you go to the satellite page, you may find that the Nuvi trys to "stick" to the road as you go off over the country side. Obviously this is a desirable feature when driving, but very annoying when out with the Nuvi in your hand.

Here's some help in how to set the Nuvi into "off-road mode/pedestrian mode" to fix this problem.

Here is Off Road mode:

--->

--->

Now you will se a direct line between you and the cache plotted on the screen. If you have to do some heavy bushwacking, when you move toward the cache it draws another line from your current position to the cache. If the longer line is to the right simply walk right and follow the line (if there's not a tree in the way!) and vice-versa. The display will tell you how many feet to go til you arrive at GZ.

 

The Nuvi 3xx series has this option in the NAVIGATION menu.

The end?

Well I could go on, but we've broken the back of the whole thing. You really can do all of this without paper. I really do think the Nuvi is such a versatile GPS for geocaching.

Not only can it store all the info required to go searching, but it'll take you the quickest way there by car too! I think it's great. Sure I miss a compass rose at the very end, but it doesn't take long to get used to the tracking orb.

Try it out, I hope you found this tutorial useful, all I ask is that if you do use it, please drop in a reply here to say you found it worthwhile!

Thank you and happy hunting.

Pilotsnipes.