GPS on your Treo 650

[From Mark Rosengarten
Wallkill, NY] Being an avid geocacher, I am always on the lookout for new ways to make my sport more interesting. Lately, I have been investigating the possibility of using my Treo as my sole geocaching partner, paired with a bluetooth GPSr! So, after many months of hemming and hawing about what to do, I finally bit the bullet and bought. I got a Globalsat BT-338 bluetooth GPSr (runiing the latestest SiRFIII technology) and TomTom Navigator 5 for my Treo. I installed the TomTom app with no problem (it mostly installs to the SD card, and the map data installs directly to SD), but you have to go through a short activation process before you can upload the maps to your device. The maps cover the US and Canada in the package I got, and there are several CD's, as the data is broken down into regions (Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, Plains, Southeast, South Central, etc.). I am taking a storm-chasing trip in 8 weeks, and I wanted to leave the laptop and handheld GPSr at home. This the Treo, I can. I read up on how to convert geocaching GPX waypoints into TomTom waypoints and uploaded over 3000 geocaches to the Treo. My handheld GPSr can only handle 500 waypoints. I also use Cachemate, which can hold a virtually unlimited number of geocaches in its database, and it's paired with CacheNav, which I can use as a directional arrow to find the cache. So, I use Navigator to drive to the cache area, then Cachenav to find the cache, then Geocaching.com's WAP site to log the find! In this manner, I can go all over the middle of the country during my trip and always find caches. I use Geocaching.com's Pocket Query feature to find caches in the states I will be visiting. I can only download 500 at a time, so I have the site send me all of the caches with a difficulty of 1/1, then 1/1.5, all the way to 2/2 (the way they measure the difficulty of finding the cache and the difficulty of the terrain you have to travel to get to it, on a 1-5 scale). I am going no higher than 2/2, because I will have precious little time to find caches while chasing down storms on the Plains.

Navigator 5 is an amazing piece of software. It's responsive, flexible and very intuitive. It's by far the best navigation and mapping app I have seen yet, even beating my dedicated Garmin 2610 auto navigator. Depending on how the Treo handles geocaching this summer, I might sell my Garmin GPSMAP60CS and just buy a waterproof, shockproof case for the Treo and use it full-time as my geocaching device. I am going to Albany, NY today, and there is a cache on the way there. I will use this method to find the cache, and I will report back on how well it worked!

Here's the link to Semson's, the place I got the package: Here's the link to Cachemate and Cachenav.