March 20, 6:00 am Technology - Ballina, NSW, Australia
I have just exchanged my Roadmap chip for Alberta/BC for the City Navigator NT Aus & NZ map in my Garmin Montana 600 unit. It worked perfectly. The caches I downloaded to the Garmin appeared on the map and the automobile routing worked. It is still a bit of surprise to me when something works seamlessly the first time. I would like to find one cache today. I need one cache for each of the next 3 days in order to fill in the squares for those dates on the grid for all the days of the year. When I last looked at the map for these caches the Montana said they were about 13,000 km away. Now the device says they are about 5 km away. This is good.
March 12, 3:00 PM Technology
This activity is often a place where I can describe problems and frustrations. It is a reminder of the psychic overhead of using technology.
A few days ago I ran into a problem with using the geocaching website to download cache information into my Garmin Montana 600 GPS unit. Instead of executing the command the website generated an error message. The message itself was not informative - it simply was some technical path name that failed.
Although this was a surprise as I had never seen this type of message before, it was not critical as I could still tap in the coordinates for a cache site and treat it as a waypoint. Then when I was near the cache I could use the display of where I was and could compare that with what I written down and thus zero in on where the cache was hidden. But it was a more cumbersome process than simply using the compass display on the GPS unit to walk toward the cache site.
Later when I was home I spent a couple of hours trying to determine what was causing the error. Was there a problem with my GPS unit, or was the problem with my computer. And if the computer, was it a technical problem with the hardware or was it software? And if software, what software? Was it the geocaching website, or the browser, or the Garmin plug-in.
A phone call to a geocaching friend indicated that everything was fine on his PC. This would suggest that the problem was not likely to be the geocaching website (although it still could be). But I was now leaning toward it possibly being my Montana 600 unit or something to do with my Mac (either hardware or software). I tried re-installing the Firefox browser and the Garmin Communicator Plugin software on the Mac but this didn't make any difference.
Then this morning I phoned tech support at Garmin and was told that they were aware of the problem and that it was with their Garmin Communicator Plugin software for the Mac. At the moment they are still trying to fix it. At least the problem was not with my unit, but I was still caught unable to easily transfer cache information from the geocaching website to my GPS unit. Fortunately I have another laptop that is a PC that I use to run some PC programs for my model train layout. I turned it on and downloaded the Garmin Communicator Plugin for the PC. I now had a working system with the Montana 600 plugged into the USB port on the PC. I quickly transferred information for about 20 cache sites that I hope to try to find in the near future.
I am now good to go, again. So long as I use a PC. I'm not sure when Garmin will have their problem fixed.