I mentioned earlier that our latest family ambition is Geocaching. It’s turned out to be a great fun. We’ve fit in short hikes on weeknights and longer hikes on weekends, and we’ve found it to be the perfect outing for inviting friends along. The kids love knowing there is a treasure at the end of their hike, but the best part for me is discovering great little nooks and new parts of town wherever we go. It’s kind of like being shown around by a local, almost as good anyway. If you’re interested in trying it out and happen to have an iPhone, you can try starting with the Geocache app. But incase an iPhone isn’t in your short-term plans, or incase you want better accuracy and the made-for GPS maps, I’ve convinced my handsome husband to write a guest post about choosing the right GPS unit. Thanks, Brent.

I admit I’m an amateur when it comes to GPS units, but I did work at Circuit City (may they rest in peace) to put myself through college. So I know a thing or two about researching consumer electronics. Before buying our family’s hand-held GPS, I scoured forums and reviews by users to find a unit that was best for us. If you are shopping around for a GPS unit, here are a few things that were important to me.

• Antenna strength. If you can’t get the signal it isn’t much good. If you are in a car on major roadways this may not be a problem, but if you are hiking in the backwoods you need something that can get a good signal. We are all about hiking in the backwoods, so I had to find a unit that is WAAS enabled. WAAS is a system that uses ground-based stations and a lot of cool math to make the signal up to 5 times stronger than the normal GPS signal.
• Paperless Geocaching. This is a feature that I really wanted since Geocaching was a big reason I wanted a GPS unit in the first place. This allows you to download coordinates, descriptions, and comments from geocaching.com to take with you wherever you go. When you’re planning a trip, it is great to be able to download clues to a handful of chaches and then hit these at your leisure while you are in the area, if you have any downtime. You will be surprised, even astounded, at how many caches are hidden within the area that you are staying.
• Maps, maps, maps. This is where they get you. A good hiking GPS unit is not cheap, and it does not come with maps (and if it does the map isn’t necessarily the one you want). You buy maps separately, and you have a choice of (a) road maps or (b) a few types of TOPO maps. Or one of each. And if you buy a TOPO map and want to use it in your kyak, you’ll need to buy a seperate nautical map. The more I look at it the more I think you should pay for a good road map on your GPS, even if you bought the unit mainly for hiking. With the road maps installed, your GPS unit will become quite the handy helper to get you to the trail-head, get you to a restaurant close by, or find a hospital to take care of the snake bite. As for TOPO maps, unless you get one with good detail, it isn’t going to help you much in your grand backwoods adventures. Garmin sells a 24k map of California, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington which seems to be a good buy. But be ready to pay around $100 for a package of maps. You’ll want to be sure it’s the latest version. I’ve been told that the Garmin 100k map isn’t worthwhile (it comes preloaded on some units, like the Garmin Oregon 400), unless you also buy the National Geographic maps to go with it.
• Easy Interface. Unlike some (ahem, my wife), I like to read the manual with any gadget I purchase. Nonetheless, I wanted a GPS unit my wife could use as well as the kids. I think we did well. Our 6-year-old has a good grasp on running the unit already, and one day I believe my wife will also.

So then, taking all this into account, here’s what we purchased: Garmin Oregon 300.
It has everything I need once I buy a few maps. I like the size, I like that it runs on 2 AA batteries (on a long hike it wouldn’t be fun to have to run back and charge your batteries), and I like the display. So far it’s been a handy unit, and we’re looking forward to toting it along on many adventures to come.

And we have one more announcement to make. We’ve started working on a geocaching documentary. A very small, homegrown geocaching documentary by our little family. You can follow its progress here. We’ve planted a few bugs in geocaches here in northern California. They have these TV charms attached. (We made them, do you like?) We’re hopoing to collect videos from willing geocachers who come across them. Wish us luck.

Tags: gifts for him, gifts for outdoors, gifts for the whole family, gifts worth pitching in for

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 7:45 am and is filed under Gift ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.