I had a birthday recently and in addition to cake, ice cream and a lot of fun Sweetie and SuperPizzaBoy got me a new gadget. A new GPS receiver. The Garmin nuvi 500. It is a crossover GPS in that it does car navigation and geocaching. If you are a premium level geocaching.com member you can download tons and tons of caches to your pc and with then into the nuvi 500.

So anyway we have only found a few caches with this and I’m still learning how to use it so I don’t know whether it is going to supplement or replace my old gps. The nuvi is not very handy to hold and doesn’t seem to be as rugged and waterproof as the handheld gpsr’s. Also, you have to do a manual change from vehicle navigation to cross country once you get out of the car and I had’t quite figured out how to do that smoothly.

The thing that is helpful in geocaching is the cache description, hints, and logs of previous finds. Most handhelds just hold the name and location. For the other stuff you either have to print them out and carry (yuck) or you can use software for your cell phone like cachemate I use on my Palm Treo cell phone. That’s OK but then you have to juggle two gadgets. The nuvi carries all that stuff in it. That is incredibly handy.

The screen is nice and bright in sunlight, and you can have a lot of fun with the car navigation feature. SPB and I made the vehicle icon into a pickup truck to match good ole 666BOI better and we switched the voice from a bitchy lady Californian (it sounded to my ear) to a merely irritated English female voice. We are going to download a pizza slice icon from Garmin’s web site to be the vehicle icon.

Anyway, the jury is still out on the nuvi. Its a keeper for navigation, and I am definitely going to use it for geocaching to at least supplement by my existing gpsr. I can see using the nuvi to use to drive to the vicinity of the cache and then my handheld to find the cache. I’ll just have to experiment.

This is my existing gpsr. The Lowrance Ifinder Hunt. (Lowrance is a Tulsa based company). I have found maybe 600 caches with it and love it. It can hold in memory about 2000 caches. The nuvi can hold about 4000.

If you are going to do geocaching then you are going to need GSAK. An incredible piece of software that facilitates downloading caches from geocaching.com and uploading to your gpsr. It’s cheap, you can try it for free for a while before a nag screen appears.