I bought a Magellan SporTrak map last week for my 11yr old son and I to go geocaching together. We have been having a devil of a time finding caches. My neighbor brought his old Garmin on our last trip and bingo - he's right on it and I'm 20' away. Tried it again at another cache today with the same results.

Anybody have a SporTrak map that works? If this unit is this inaccurate I'll send it back and upgrade to something else.

Thanks... Tomy

I have the Maggie Map and it works great for me. Somedays all GPS are way off. Within 20 feet is about standard for most GPS units

Dunno much about Maggies, but do you have it set for true north or magnetic north? SHould be on true north.

I finally noticed with the garmin units, when you do a software upgrade it resets from true to magnetic...

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Originally posted by Tomy51:
I bought a Magellan SporTrak map last week for my 11yr old son and I to go geocaching together. We have been having a devil of a time finding caches. My neighbor brought his old Garmin on our last trip and bingo - he's right on it and I'm 20' away. Tried it again at another cache today with the same results.

Anybody have a SporTrak map that works? If this unit is this inaccurate I'll send it back and upgrade to something else.

Thanks... Tomy

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Tomy,

I've seen this alot with Magellan owners.
I have a Meridian Yellow and it does the same thing. I have found that when the unit is on a while it will many times be off 20-30 feet.
I know that people say <30 feet is acceptable, but if you are consistently 30 feet away and the placer has error, then you can be getting up to 50 feet away.

Here is some advice:

First, as you approach about 100 feet (you can set an arrival alarm to tell you) make sure to slow down your progress. At first, I would overshoot caches alot and have to circle back.
Sometimes you will see the cache if you start looking sooner instead of watching your GPSr until you get a reading of 10 feet or such. You might have just walked right past it.

Second, if you have stopped at the site and looked around and have not found it, walk away from the location and re-approach it from another direction, keeping an eye out around you at about the 20-30 feet range.

Third, if all this fails you, do an Initialize of the unit. It is not difficult to do and will help you. My trick is to get closest to 0 ft that you can get and then do the Setup/Initialize.
Now quickly switch back to the compass screen and watch the direction the arrow points. It will be way off at first (like 150 feet), but the distance will drop as the unit begins averaging. What I have found is that most of the time, the cache is 20-30 feet in the direction the arrow points after the Initialize. If you keep waiting, it will eventually put you back at 0 feet, but we all know it could be 20-30 feet off.

I'm not sure of why some Magellans do this, but they apparently do. I've considered switching to a Garmin on my next purchase, but they have their issues as well. The new unit we are discussing in this thread may swing the vote for me.

Hope this info helps you.

Kenneth

Thanks for the replies and advice.

I returned the unit to Magellan and I'll wait and see what happens. I wish I had see the Garmin 60 series before I bought the SporTrak.

Tomy

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Originally posted by Cymbaline:
...SHould be on true north....

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I like magnetic north, make it easier to use my magnetic compass.

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Originally posted by kennethpruett:

I've seen this alot with Magellan owners.
I have a Meridian Yellow and it does the same thing. I have found that when the unit is on a while it will many times be off 20-30 feet.
I know that people say <30 feet is acceptable, but if you are consistently 30 feet away and the placer has error, then you can be getting up to 50 feet away.
Kenneth

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If you are always off in exactly the same direction then it sounds like it might be a problem with the unit. However if you are 20 feet north one time, 25 feet southwest another, and 30 feet east another, then most likly it is just regular GPS unit error.