Putting it all together

Before I go into detail about transferring data, I should explain a bit about how I go about geocaching. I have a basic membership (free) on the geocaching.com website. Some of the limitations with the basic membership are that you don’t get notified of new geocaches, you cannot download a GPX file containing details of geocaches to transfer to a GPS unit and you cannot run a Pocket Query which provides a GPX file with details of a large number of geocaches in a chosen area/route. 

For me, these aren’t really a limitation. I generally don’t have the time to get in the hunt for a First To Find, and if I’m going to go out geocaching, then I generally go to a specific area to do this. I can check what geocaches are in the area and load them onto the eTrex H. So I plan my geocaching and head off to get geocaches in a chosen area when I can, rather than being opportunistic and visiting one if one happens to be close by wherever I happen to be.

This is also an easy way to get an introduction to geocaching – I can carefully choose the geocaches I wish to visit - making sure that the terrain is not too difficult for other family members that might be coming along, and checking that it’s been found recently and isn’t missing in action. 

I am actually going to get a premium membership next month and will then grapple with stripping the GC’s from the GPX file provided by a Pocket Query (and describe my success or otherwise here) but will probably still approach geocaching in the same way.

Moving on

Anyway, continuing on from my previous post…..once I had the cable for the eTrex H and installed the drivers I was all set to be able to connect it up to the computer and start transferring waypoints for geocaches. Now I need to get the computer set up to send the data via the cable. I use Firefox as my web browser (can’t recommend it highly enough) and everything that I am about to describe here uses Firefox as a platform and using the geocaching.com website.

The first thing I needed was the Garmin Communicator Plugin. This enables Firefox to talk directly to the eTrex H, and you can get a copy from the Garmin website (http://www8.garmin.com/products/communicator/). On a side note, the plugin also works with Chrome and Safari.

Send to GPS

Once the plugin is installed I can now send a waypoint straight to the eTrex H by using the ‘Send to GPS’ link from the geocaching.com website.

For example, on the geocaching .com website, I can view a map of geocaches in an area and click on a cache to get more detail (see below).

If I select the highlighted ‘Send to GPS’ link, a new pop-up window opens as Firefox, using the Garmin Communicator Plugin attempts to find the eTrex H.

I can now see the detail of what is going to be sent to the eTrex H. Highlighted above is the code for the geocache, and this is what will become the waypoint name in the eTrex H. If I click on the ‘Write’ button in this window the data will be sent to the eTrex H but the last character of the code will be missing – it will be stored as ‘GC1PV8’. If I was to later send another geocache to the unit which started with the same six characters this one would be overwritten and I would lose it. To get around this, remove the GC – just delete  it in the window so that it looks like this:

Then click on the ‘Write’ button and it is sent to the eTrex H. If it works then you get a message back indicating success:

How does this look on the eTrex H? Here is the eTrex H without any waypoints entered:

And here it is after the transfer is complete – note the ‘transfer complete’ message and the geocache coordinates are now loaded onto the eTrex H as a waypoint:

All I have to do now is select it and start walking!

The above is all fine if you only want to load one or two waypoints, or if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands. It’s quick and easy (certainly much easier than entering waypoints manually) but will still take a little while to load a lot of geocaches before heading off to find them.

This is where the use of GreaseMonkey scripts in conjunction with the geocaching.com website comes in – semi automation (and a further post) here we come!