GPSMAP 60CS - Refining one of my tools

After caching recently with kschu, he mentioned that through the tags feature in GSAK he had put modified hints in his Garmin GPSMAP 60.

Since he had modified the notes manually, I rarely use hints and I already have all the cache information in my Blackberry Curve using Cacheberry, this did not interest me however tweeking my GPS contained information did.

I had used the strings but was finding what I had not doing all I needed and had set it up a few years back when I first got my GPS. It was time to play. The following are my preferences, yours may vary. The tags in GSAK are a wonderful thing.

Using the tag strings, I modified my GPS to show me in the find screen the waypoint designation (sans the "GC"), the cache container, the cache type and the terrain and difficulty.



In the notes area, I show the caches given name, the status of the last four logs, date of last find and if there is a travel bug or not. The date field format is based on the short date format you use in Windows as set in the "Regional and Language Options". Have not played with these settings in Wine yet.



The two tag srings are;

Waypoint name = %drop2-%con1,%typ1,%dif1,%ter1 %notGC%code
Waypoint Description format = %smart=15 %last4 %datelf %bug



This gives me all the information I really need in the field, at least within the limitations of my Garmin GPSMAP 60CS. I hope this gets you thinking of ways to make your GPS more efficient for the way you use it.