The day I won a free GSAK registration at a geocaching event was a great thing for us. Once I eventually got GSAK working for us (i.e. figuring out the problem was with the Magellan cable, and not the program), it ended our days of slowly, painfully, entering each geocache one at a time, entering each set of coordinates one digit at a time, and then writing each piece of cache information in a notebook. Hundreds of geocaches are now uploaded into our GPS receivers in seconds, error-free.
There is a problem with the method I’ve worked out for uploading geocaches, and I’m not sure what the solution is. The source of the problem is that our TomTom and our Magellan eXplorist store geocaches differently. Our TomTom stores geocaches in one big (how big, I haven’t discovered yet) Point Of Interest category I created and named “Geocache”. When I’m ready to upload a fresh batch of geocaches, all I do is filter out the caches we don’t want to do (unsolved puzzles and multi-caches, mostly) from our GSAK database, and then upload them to the TomTom.
Things get more complicated with our Magellan. The eXplorist stores geocaches in “files” of no more than 200 caches. So far, I haven’t discovered a way to add to an existing file. The only options are to overwrite an existing file or create a new one. So, if we want to geocache in an area away from home – Long Beach Peninsula, for example – I need to create a GSAK filter outlining the area of the peninsula and Astoria, filtering out the caches we don’t want to do, and then upload them into a file named “Long Beach”.
Our TomTom has one big POI for geocaches and our Magellan has several files. The problem with the two methods is that the sets of geocaches in our GPS receivers never completely match up. A cache that shows up on the TomTom screen might have been filtered out from the Magellan. I’ve thought, briefly, about setting up mini-POIs on the TomTom that correspond to the Magellan files, but that seems more complicated than it’s worth. There are GSAK macros that upload the entire GSAK database, 200 caches at a time into separate files, but I’m not sure how we’d find which caches are closest to us.
To be honest, I place the blame for the problem on our Magellan eXplorist. The trouble with the fragile cable was only the start of my unhappiness with the GPSr. If I thought Phillip and I had a better future in geocaching, I’d replace the thing with a Garmin. And the start of my displeasure with the eXplorist began with GSAK.
