Thursday, January 31, 2013

Putting Waypoints on Multiple Receivers

For a large set of receivers, if you want to quickly put your waypoints on all of them, you have to have the right software. There are several free options, which, depending upon your tech-savviness, may take a bit of practice and finagling. Depending upon your type of receivers AND your type of computer, you may find the following useful:

For Garmin GPS receivers: Garmin BaseCamp - This software is free and is available for PC or Mac. Garmin BaseCamp will allow you to upload waypoints from one receiver to the program. Then, you can easily change the names of your waypoints, organize into hunt lists (i.e. Golf Ball Hunt, Madison Elementary Autumn Cache event, etc.), and hook up each individual receiver after that in order to download to all of your units.

For Magellan GPS receivers: VantagePoint - This software works much like Garmin's BaseCamp, except it is only available as a PC download. So if you have a Mac computer and you use Magellan units, I have used MacCaching free software and it works well.

For Geomate.jr receivers: Go here to sign up for a free account. Then download what you need for your PC or Mac here. From that point, you use the Custom Cache tab to upload waypoints from one Geomate device, then download to all your Geomates.

With any software, you are bound to run into glitches and tech issues! This is where Google searching for solutions can be very helpful. Be patient, do some research, ask around, check the software requirements. A simple driver may need to be downloaded and your computer restarted first before it will work. Be willing to contact the software designers or check forums on their websites to dig for more info. if you're still having trouble.

There are others out there...this post only scraped the surface. Feel free to post any others in the comments!

Keep 'em educaching,

Jason and the Educaching Team