Paperless caching
I went yesterday to Antwerp in order to do some shopping for all my GPS gear. My car navigation unit had some troubles after an update to the Navteq Q4/2008 maps. The installation process told that it couldn’t on the standard 2 Gb SD card. A second try (without deleting anything) worked but the side effect was that the installation process wiped al my bookmarked addresses. Contacting Navigon didn’t reveal much, which seems to be common for this manufacturer. Whatever problem you send to this help desk result in the standard replies:
- It’s a problem with the mapping material a.k.a. Navteq. In reality this isn’t true and the problems at the system software interpreting the material wrongly. Apparently they don’t want to understand this and it’s much easier to blame someone else.
- They don’t understand the problem and send a reply that has nothing to do with it.
- They finally understand the problem and the reply that they’ll move it to the software department. This department is the black hole of the company, since one doesn’t hear anything about it anymore and no updates appear either. The last one was > 6 months ago.
So I bought a 4 Gb SD card to solve this problem on my own, hoping that the next map update will fit in it.
Speaking about map updates. I recently upgraded my topo maps for Belgium to a new (routable) one. It seems that this one is also memory hungry since it doesn’t fit on the 128Mb micro SD card that was fitted in my Garmin 60Cx. So I replace that with a 2Gb version. With that I can also add topo maps of Switzerland too.
Since I was at that shop, I took the chance to by me a Palm Z22 to do some paperless caching. After reading dome forums, did seemed to be a good device for it. Arrived at home, things went smooth concerning the memory upgrades, but the Z22 was something else. My computer didn’t recognize the Z22. A Z22 is apparently so old that it doesn’t know what Vista. After searching on internet, I found some Vista software for the Z22. But even than it didn’t work. The problem seems to be that I’m working with Vista 64 bit. I was having a déjà vu. I had the same problem with a viaMichelin GPS unit. Luckily I still had a partition with Windows XP available. That implies that I need to (re)install tools like GSAK on this partition too.
Once that’s done, I could start thinking about installing caching software on my Z22. I went first for the free GPX Spinner/Plucker. combination, but that turned out not be working. Apart from the tedious way of generating things, the synchronisation gave some errors on synchronisation. So I gave up that line of thinking and went completely for the non free GSAK / Cachemate solution. Again, not the most automatic way to do things, meaning:
- Build a pocket query with the caches you want
- Import in GSAK and filter out things
- Export in cachemate format
- Sync it with cachemate
At first glance the result looked very bad, certainly for the multi-caches. I only exported all the not found caches within a periphery of 20 km around my home coordinates and I ended up with tens of waypoints with the name Parking. I expected to see a more nested / drop down list though. I did manage to make things more readable via the options, but things are still far from perfect. Maybe it’s just a matter of RTFM, but I at this moment, I expected more from it.
Update: HeadHardHat provided a nice video tutorial for paperless caching
Part 1
Part 2
