Geocaching with the Nokia 7710 and LD-1W

"Geocaching". I was first introduced to the activity by a relative. It's an activity that involves a bit of technology, a bit of hiking, some nature appreciation and it's something you can experience with children. Here's how it works. There's the "Official Global GPS Cache Hunt Site" www.geocaching.com for short, that you use as the starting place. From that site, you look up caches in locations that interests you.

The site has information about the location of the cache. You can find geo coordinates that you input into your GPS. For my situation, I had the Nokia 7710 phone and the Nokia LD-1W GPS Module. The phone hooks up to the GPS module via bluetooth. The GPS module comes with Wayfinder GPS software that you install into your phone. Unfortunately, the Nokia 7710 employs the Symbian s90 operating system that isn't supported by default. I had to hunt around for the s90 version. Although, it isn't as reliable as the s60 version, the larger screen of 7710 compensates for this.

For my first successful geocaching trip, I didn't employ the Wayfinder, rather I used another s90 compatible program "MapView GPS II". I didn't know this from an earlier attempt. I had to learn the hard way that there were different ways for entering coordinates. I entered the "DMS" coordinates, only to realize that MapView required in in "NAD83" form. I realized this when my GPS was telling me that I was 5km away from a location that was right under me. In general, the difficult technical part here is trying to figure out what formats your GPS software can digest without of course getting you completely lost.

It's a bit difficult hiking with children. They wander off in the wrong direction, get tired easily and worse of all, get hungry quickly. It's paramount that when you introduce them to this activity, that you actually discover the cache.

With MapView GPS can download maps however, I haven't figured out how to do that. So I was at a disadvantage in not being able to determine the location based on the shape of the land. I only had information of my location relative to the cache's location. Since this was my first time, I had imagined that if my GPS said I was 0.0km from the location, then I would find the cache right under me. Unfortunately, that's not the case, the LD-1W has an accuracy of around 82 feet. That's a bit of a wide area, and one hopes that the cache isn't hidden that well.

Fortunately, it was covered by just a pile of twigs. We found the cache and the kids came home thrilled. Excited of the prospect of going on another geocaching trip.