MnGCA

MN_Cavepeople · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2005 Posts: 369

I'm finally looking at upgrading my GPS from my trusty little Geko to something that at least lets me download waypoints without having to punch in all the coords by hand (after 600 caches, this is getting a bit old).

Here's the question: I use a Mac, and I know there are others out there that do, so I'm wondering how well the process of downloading the waypoints from a Mac works?

I've been researching it a bit but wanted some feedback from those that do it on a regular basis.

Thanks!

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

There are some applications out there that do it but the only one that I know of that's free is GPSBabel but I haven't looked in quite some time.

I don't use my Mac for anything caching related though and I know Moe has jumped ship to using a Win-based laptop for geocaching related stuff.
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Sad state of affairs.

fidian · Geocacher Joined: 23 Nov 2005 Posts: 126

gpsbabel runs on Linux, so as long as your Macintosh is relatively new, it should be able to compile or get a compiled version of gpsbabel for your system.
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Centris · Posted: Fri Dec 01, 2006 3:29 am Post subject:

I use MacGPSBabel all the time on both my G5 and my laptop and it works great.

You will have to get different interconnect cables to make the physical connection between your GPS and your Mac.
I use a Keyspan USB High Speed Serial Adapter and a Garmin serial cord because the Garmin USB cable does not work with GPSBabel. It's not a big deal once you have it set up and working.

RouteBuddy 1.1 and MacGPS Pro both claim to work with the Garmin USB cable but I have not tried either program. I'm sure there are other good programs out there that I don't know about, but I like Babel just fine.

Garmin promised Mac users compatibility/ support last January but it has not happened yet.

link
I would love to see a Mac program that works with the GPS units like iTunes works with the iPod -- drag and drop and download and GO

MN_Cavepeople · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2005 Posts: 369

Its good to hear that it works well even if there are a few minor work arounds to set up.

I read all the stuff about Garmin promising Mac support for all their units by the end of this year, too. And that their map products, software, etc. would have Mac versions available as well. Which all sounds good, but we are pretty much at the end of the year.

Marsha and Silent Bob · Past MnGCA President Joined: 02 Sep 2003 Posts: 6261

I'm fairly certain that they have been promising, and not delivering, for quite some time.
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Sad state of affairs.

MN_Cavepeople · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2005 Posts: 369

I received my new GPS over the weekend...Merry Christmas. It took me a whole 5 minutes to get the thing connected to my Mac, download GPS Babel and get the first cache transfered into the unit. I was planning on spending half the day troubleshooting. Works slicker than I had hoped!

I used the USB cable from my digital camera directly from the Mac to the GPS and didn't have to mess with the Centris' serial adapter work-around so I was happy with that too.

sir_zman · Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 2:35 pm Post subject:

The host of the Cache-A-Maniacs podcast contacted me and told me about MacCaching - http://www.maccaching.com/ which is supposed to be a freeware software similar to GSAK but for the Mac.

He says it's not as powerful as GSAK, but it's free, and designed for the Mac. I'd be interested in hearing from any Mac users out there how well this software works.

Centris · Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 5:05 pm Post subject:

I'm on it...... Cool

It downloaded and started up nicely.... looks very intuitive (Mac-like) so far.
I will try it on both my Garmins and my Maggie.... we'll see what happens

MN_Cavepeople · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2005 Posts: 369

I'll check it out too.

Thanks zman!

bflentje · Geocacher Joined: 29 May 2006 Posts: 3652

pfalstad · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2006 Posts: 963 Location: Edina

pfalstad · Geocacher Joined: 02 Feb 2006 Posts: 963 Location: Edina

p.s. mac users may enjoy this puzzle.. GCMVPH

Centris · Posted: Mon May 14, 2007 6:45 pm Post subject:

Centris · Posted: Tue May 22, 2007 12:39 am Post subject:

I finally remembered to acquire some pq's and took some time to put the Mac software to the test....

It works ok for both my Garmins but I am not 100% with it. It has major possibilities and will no doubt improve over time. You can see where the writers are going with the idea.

Bad news was that I had to relaunch the app several times because some condition was not met or something happened in setting up the GPS or some other mysterious error -- Babel just has prompts and does not crash if things are not ideal or if you do something boneheaded.

As far as the ipod sync goes... I dug out an old unused 4gb mini and charged it up (and updated it). I figured if anything went wrong I would not be too sad to lose the data on that ipod and it would be an easy restore. Smile

I was not thrilled when MacCashing suddenly downloaded 500 cache pages to my ADDRESS BOOK before it did a contact sync with iTunes. I guess I expected the sync to be smoother, kind of more like moving files in and out of the PDA... when I loaded up another pq and dumped another few hundered caches into my address book it went pretty quick -as well as magically restoring all the first batch of cache pages back into my address book after I deleted them (LOL - my fault)

But the good news is that it took up very little data space. So even an old small ipod will hold LOTS of cache pages.
The caches show up nicely on the ipod screen and are very easy to scroll and read even though the screen is b&w and fairly small. All html tags show up, but can be ignored easily. Bonus is that ipod is smaller than my PDA so it will be easier to store in the cache bag. I'm going to try caching with the ipod once or twice to see how I like it.