quote:

Originally posted by johnnie:
While hunting with friends lately I have notice how for behind the times I am now days. So I am thinking PDA. What would be a good basic PDA without all the bells and horns?

A Palmpilot III with 8MB of RAM is all you need. It's old and slow though, but works fine.

Alternatively, a PalmPilot i705 works well too - that's what I used until I moved to the Tungsten E - more memory, slightly faster, and color.

You should find something on ebay for less than $35-40. In the case of a Tungsten E or E2, you might need go to as high as $80.

I think I posted this somewhere else on these forums, but no biggie.

First GPS: Rino 110, December '02. Got it with my buddy Allan/Armkreuz, we then went and found 3 caches the first day without reading hte manuals. Found them by matching the actual lat/long with what the cache page printouts said. This is the same Rino that went for a swim in Lake Lanier and was ultimately replaced - for free - by garmin.

Second/third GPS: After the Rino-in-the-lake fiasco, I couldn't decide whether to get a Rino 130 or a GPSMap 60CS. While trying to decide, I received an unexpected financial windfall which allowed me to get both. I still use each of thse to this day. The 60CS stays in the truck 95% of the time and is used for autonav. I pull it out of the truck to use when I place caches, since it does averaging. Otherwise, the Rino 130 is still my day-to-day find-the-cache unit.

As much as I would like to get a 60CSX, I just can't justify it. The 60CS is doing me just fine, and although the memory restriction (56MB) drives me nuts sometime, I can't see spending another $450 for a new unit. Maybe someday, if the 60CS ever dies..

I forgot to mention I do use a PDA. I have a Sony Clie (palm look alike) I got about 3 years ago from overstock.com. Originally I used a program that I wrote which acted like GPXSpinner to process my pocket queries except it ran on the mail server. But then I discovered GSAK, which has the advantages of keeping more than 5 logs, able to do more powerful filtering. So I use it to keep track of geocaches and on the spur of the moment, can get a set of geocaches. I have GSAK macro to run the filter, output a Mapsource file for my Garmin and trigger Plucker. So when it finishes I load the Mapsource file into the GPS V, and the plucked file into my PDA. Now for the more "interesting" geocaches (the kind that take all or most of a day to get to), I tend to print out a topo map of the trail and surrounding area.

I pack a Garmin 76csx and Blackberry. Though for anything in mountains out of coverage I tend to have hard copies at least in the truck, if not in my pack.

The blackberry pays dividends when you can get a signal though by being able to do things like take a quick peek at doppler radar when deciding whether to go for "one more" or head for the truck.