A brief guide to GPS and Geocaching

Geocaching relies on two parties to play the game – the one who hides the cache and the one who finds it. The hider must log the co-ordinates of the cache, usually on Geocaching.com, inputting the latitude and longitude of the location. If this is inaccurate, perhaps because the hider didn’t pay attention to accuracy of the co-ordinates, then it doesn’t matter how smart or feature-filled the finder’s GPS is, he will still have difficulty finding it. So, if you are thinking about buying a GPS unit, a simple and inexpensive one, can be just as good as the one with all the bells and whistles.

There are a few things you should look for though:

• A compact and lightweight model for easy carrying
• Good battery life – you might be out for a full day once you really get hooked.
• Easy to read screen with a backlight for nighttime cache hunting
• Waypoint storage – waypoints are the cache locations so you want one that can store a decent amount of them for a weekend’s cache hunting

Other than that, if you want additional features go for it, but being WAAS enabled – giving you better accuracy – or having mapping capabilities to see the terrain, may make little difference in your geocaching expeditions

I use a Garmin E Trex Legend which retails at around $150, but the simpler Garmin E Trex at a round $120 is just fine (it doesn’t have the mapping capabilities). The Magellan eXplorist models 100 and 200 are also reasonably priced and have the features you would need for basic hiking and geocaching exploits. GPS Central is a great place to start looking, and you can compare models and read all the manuals before you buy.

Take a look at comparison charts so you can see which have the features you would like to have in your GPS.

Geocaching has its own language and tomorrow I’ll reveal the secrets of Travel Bugs, muggles, ‘cache-in, trash-out’, and a few other expressions you’ll come across on the geocaching sites.