Geocaching with a Garmin Nuvi 205

Geo-caching is a modern day treasure hunt which is fashioned after a game called Letterboxing which is an over 100 year old game where clues were written in stories and pointed seekers to the treasure by landmarks. Geo-caching give hints to location by coordinates that can be found using Global Positioning Satellite Receivers commonly called GPS. Many cell phones today have this feature built into them and can be used. Often the "hider" will provide additional hints to the cache along with the coordinates.

Geo-caching is a trade mark name owned by Groundspeak a company that masterminded this sport back in 2000.

 They host a website www.geocaching.com which offers free membership and is the place where info on caches are stored. Premium memberships are available for only $30 a year that offer more features than the basic free membership.

Early this month it was reported that there were over 1,007,477 active geo-caches over the world! They are everywhere rural places, business places, parking lots, parks you name it they are there.

In addition to geocaching Groundspeak logs a wide variety of other collection coordinates such as where Civil War graves are located, survey benchmarks and I even saw one group that was trying to log every KFC in existence!

Watch this video for a quick explanation of geocaching.

There many different brands and types of GPS units on the market. Prices range from below $100 to well into the $1000 dollar range.

Some GPS units are geared for specific areas of interest and or locations. Determining what features you need and want from your GPS can be mind boggling.

I determined that for starters I would use one basically in the lower 48 states of The United States.

Owning up to the fact that I got a D in Map Reading in Freshman Math and having heard so many cracks about "Sue Shortcuts" and "Mystery Trips" from my loved ones, I felt that one with street navigation would be of benefit. Yet most of the street navigation units I looked at did not give me what I wanted which was good geocaching capabilities.

The Garmin Nuvi 205 offered both of these features at a VERY reasonable price. I got mine on sale around Christmas for $98. I think the normal price is around $125. Thank You Garmin for thinking of me!

I could write all day and tell you about the basic features but this link sums it up nicely. This shows the basic preloaded features although not all are shown. It has a calculator, conversions etc. It even shows what the speed limit is where you are and how fast you are traveling.

What steered me to the Nuvi 205 ultimately was the software available between Groundspeak and Garmin which enabled me to download 500 caches at a time within a 100 mile radius of whatever zip code I wanted! You can put multiple files into the unit and it will hold even more if you purchase a mini SD memory card.

Not only does it store the coordinates it holds all the info about each cache. Such as when it was placed, what type it is, the difficulty in finding, terrain info, the last time it was found, hints and much more. All the info that most others have to print to have available is stored in my Nuvi.

There is a feature that you can use which notifies you (with a ding) when you are within a certain distance (that you specify) of any downloaded cache. I initially set this feature for 2000 ft but found that geo-caches are so prominent that this became a real pain while driving and I disabled that feature.

Once I reach a point where I can no longer drive to the coordinates of the cache I switch my GPS to walking mode and the directions of the unit take me most often to within 2 ft of the find! Sometimes this varies and the reason why is that all GPS units don't always give the exact same coordinates reading but they are close.

This is a really simple to use unit and packs a lot of features for the money. I highly recommend it.

One last word of advice......Beware of Mugglers when geo-caching! Want to know more? Ask me :)

Over and out from TrueBlueSue (known to geo-cachers as FamilyofRockHounds) at N31 degrees 02.538 W083 degrees11.793