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July 14, 2014

Advancing Technology?

When I travelled in 2003 I could fit all of the geocaches in western Canada in 5 pocket queries of 500 caches each, 2500 total. My Magellan GPS of the time could hold a max of 500 waypoints (only 200 if you wanted a comment). But it also had a feature I've missed since. You could save or load waypoints from a file stored on an SD card. I carried all those 2500 waypoints on a PDA with an app for sorting and filtering them. As we were driving down the road I could create a filter for a pie shape in front of us of 200/500 caches, write them to SD cards, swap the card between devices and load the waypoints into the GPS and go. Whenever we'd drive past the last cache on my map, I would load another set. My Garmin GPS of current day doesn't have this ability. I can exchange waypoints between it and a computer and I do that with my laptop, but it's kludgey in the car (there are also far more waypoints and much more complicated filtering required today). I recently found out that with the right cable and apps I can do some waypoint exchanges on an Android device. 11 years later I've gained back a function I had before. The funny thing is, even on the newest Garmin devices, you still can't readily exchange waypoints to other devices. They have some limited ability to transfer waypoints, but not enough versatility to load on the fly without a computer.

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Created By: Steven Nikkel (steven_nikkel@ertyu.org)
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