Not a geo-cacher but though you guys might know. I am using the 130 as part of a set of oceanographic instrumentation I am building to deploy on the GA coast. My idea would be to be able to hook a 130 to a PC and control it through the serial cable, to make it send out position polling requests at a regular interval without having to do it by hand evey ten minutes for 13 hours. Anybody know how to do this? Garmin says no but it seems that there should be a way.

Thanks in advance.

Paul
Department of Marine Science
UGA
jpmckay@uga.edu

I little more info please so we can fully understand what you are doing.

Is this right?
You have two units, one at a remote location and one local.
You want the local unit to poll the remote unit's location automatically? and store it?
When you do it now, you manually click and record the info by hand?

My first bit of research seemed to indicate they don't use NEMA for communications.
If this is true then it will be difficult.
(edit...they do support "RS232 with NMEA 0183").

Kenneth

Actually I have six units. One is with me and five are drifting around in the ocean a mile or two away. I can use the unit I keep to manually poll each remote unit and its location is stored in my handheld unit. To do this I have to select each remote unit individually and click to poll. I would prefer to automate this such that my handheld unit would poll each remote unit every ten or fifteen minutes without any action required by me.

Hmmm....would probably hard enough to have just a pair of units.

I don't know anyone who has done anything like that with a commercial handheld.

I don't have a Rino, but maybe someone else in this forum can help.

Kenneth

Paul,

Using this software you can track all your RINO's in real time http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/rino/ozirino.html

A nifty trick I did find out about is that if you name each of your RINO's with the same four Letters for example APRS01, APRS02, APRS03 etc. Then when your base station RINO polls for one unit APRS01 all the other units will also respond and be recorded in succession. I am not sure if all 12 of your units would respond because they might fight over the signal but it is worth a try. If this trick works for all 12 units checking in it might be possible to set up a robotic arm to tap the side of your base station RINO every 10 minutes. If you get someone to write a program and do this the real (better) way I would love to have it for my volunteer search and rescue team. We currently do in manually but it is a pain.

This procedure might also have some fun implications for a RINO team geocaching event if you can ever get enough together.

BB

Thanks. It looks like OziAPRS has been replaced by a new version, netAPRS, which does not work well with Rino units but I was able to get a copy of the older program and it works fine.