Cache-In Trash-Out Geocaching Event at DeLorme HQ!

April 10, 2008

It’s time to wake up the bears!

On Saturday, April 19th, join geocachers from around the state and New England at DeLorme HQ in Yarmouth, Maine, as part of the International Cache-In Trash-Out Environmental Initiative (CITO). We are planning a day of fun, food, prizes, and geocaching. DeLorme is the sole sponsor of this year’s CITO initiative, which takes place around the world in recognition of Earth Day.

Cache In Trash Out

For those who don’t know, geocaching is a sort of hide and seek game using handheld GPS receivers, like the Earthmate GPS PN-20, to locate a cache hidden by a fellow geocacher. Sometimes caches contain knick-knacks or a trackable item designed to move from cache to cache. Each cache contains a log book, as well as an online log on the geocaching.com website. There are a couple of  caches here on DeLorme property, including one maintained by Team DeLorme called Bears in the Bushes. Eartha itself is a virtual cache.

Bear In the Bush Cache

Geocaching is great fun for families with kids of all ages. Come join us and bring the family for some great outdoor fun. Feel free to stop by just to visit or stay for the day. Team DeLorme members and bloggers Chip Noble and Brian Danz will be on hand from 10am until 4pm.

Event information

See you on the 19th! 

-Brian and Chip

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Using the PN-20 and Topo USA for Bike Training Rides

April 4, 2008

For all you cyclists and athletic device owners out there, I’d like to share with you how I use my Earthmate PN-20 and Suunto T6 heart rate monitor with Topo USA 7.0 during the training season.

I captain a group of employees, friends, and family that ride as Team DeLorme in the Maine Lung Association’s Trek Across Maine each year. The Trek is a three day, 180 mile ride from the mountains to the sea — it’s quite an event.

There is also a hardcore group of riders, some of us training for the Trek, that gets together each Thursday night for a friendly but competitive hammer fest (fast ride for you non-biking readers). We had our second group ride last night. Seven riders made it out; we put in 26 miles, averaging 16 mph. Not too bad for early season spinning… especially considering there’s still snow on the ground here in Maine!

I use the Earthmate PN-20 and my Suunto T6 heart rate monitor to record athletic data during the ride that I can later view in Topo USA. Here’s a photo of the three devices I use when I’m training. The PN-20 is on the left, my Flight Deck is in the middle, and my Suunto T6 heart rate monitor is on the right.

I know, I know — you’d never put that much weight on your road bike. I get harassed by the purists here at work all the time. Keep in mind that this is my training setup; it’s what I use to track my GPS location, record my heart rate data and monitor my cadence when I’m not worried about ounces and wind resistance. I’m also involved with too many outdoor activities to buy a specialized GPS device for cycling. There are some great units that capture GPS, heart rate, and cadence all in a nice little package, but they are expensive and can’t do the other things I need. I consider my PN-20 to be an all purpose device. I use it for cycling, geocaching, upland hunting, and driving.

Sorry — I had to address that issue, as it’s a barrier to the rest of this discussion for some riders. Perhaps these screen shots will also show you why I like to have the device with me. The screen shot on the left shows the Map Page with the info field configuration that I like to use. The screen shot on the right shows the Trip Info Page that I switch to when I want extra information.

 

The most powerful tool that we use during the training season is actually Topo USA. One of our co-workers has a gift for stringing together hill climbs… he uses the route and profile tools to plan each ride. We also added cycling features to Topo 7 that show proper trip times and avoid toll roads. When he’s finished, he sends them to us as DeLorme transfer files or posts them as MapShare links. Here’s last night’s ride… 

DeLorme MapShare

I take the route file that he sends and load it on my PN-20. Before the ride starts, I clear my track and trip info statistics to get a clean track file at the end. I also start logging with my Suunto T6, which I keep calibrated to GPS time for easy syncing after the ride using Topo’s GeoTagger. The PN-20 displays GPS location, trip, turn, and finish distances; the Flight Deck displays speed and cadence; and the Suunto T6 displays heart rate, trip time, and the clock time I’m on the road. I don’t have to touch anything during the ride and I have all the data I need to keep myself in a good training zone and prevent boredom during long rides.

When I finish the ride, I save my track on the PN-20 and my athletic data log on the Suunto T6 and then store the data in my 2008 Training Season project in Topo 7. I have each track stored as a separate file and can use those files with GeoTagger, the new Topo 7 feature I mentioned earlier, to link the location information from the PN-20 to the heart rate data from the Suunto T6. You can actually do this with any heart rate monitor that has the ability to output data as a text file. We’ve created special paths for Suunto and Timex, and we support direct import from the Garmin athletic devices.

Once I’ve finished using GeoTagger to combine the track and the athletic data, I can use the Profile tool to view my altimeter elevation, wheel speed, and heart rate. If I had a cadence sensor or temperature sensor, I could view that data as well. The screen shot below shows the track log over satellite imagery on the left and Topo USA data on the right. You can see the red profile line representing my heart rate, the blue profile representing speed, and the green profile representing elevation.

The info box covering the profile shows statistics for that section of the graph and highlights the location on the map. You can see how that particular climb got my heart pumping pretty fast. Clearly, there’s some work to do before the group rides strike out for the real hill sessions! Check back for more athletic data posts from Team DeLorme rides throughout the season.

-Chip

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Posted by Chip Noble - Design

Hidden Features of the PN-20

April 2, 2008
Hidden features are a tough topic in the UI group, where we try to make sure everything is accessible and easy to use. If you have to read the manual to find the feature, there’s a good chance you will never discover it.
Having said that, sometimes requests come along for shortcuts that save time but aren’t necessary to complete a process. We’ve found that the PN-20 — with its limited number of buttons and small screen — was a good candidate for some of these shortcuts. We’ve documented them in the manual and we’re comfortable that they aren’t required to complete any tasks, but they do save time. So here’s my list of shortcuts … with a few general tips sprinkled in.
Menus
  • When you are at the top of a menu, press up on the arrow keypad to move all the way to the bottom. All menus and page lists are looped together in this way.
  • The IN and OUT buttons move up and down a menu or list one page at a time. Rather than scroll through the entire page, press OUT to quickly jump to the next page.
Keyboard

The PN-20 Keyboard

  • To edit text, start typing to replace all the text or use the left and right arrow keys to add to the beginning or end of the text. 
  • Press OUT to quickly jump to the OK button.
  • Press IN to quickly delete the last character entered.
  • The edges of the keyboard are linked like the top and bottom of a menu. You can scroll left to get to the right or up to get to the bottom.
  • Press the shift key (up arrow) once to make a single letter upper case, press it a second time to use all upper case letters, and press it a third time to return to lower case letters.
Find
  • Find By Name performs a Near Map Center search until you add extra search information like City and State.
  • The Find menu offers two Find By Name choices: Begins With and Contains. Consider using Contains if you’re not sure of the search name spelling.
Satellite Page
  • If you’re working with the PN-20 indoors, press MENU. At the top of the menu, Disable GPS is highlighted. Press ENTER to disable GPS and make the device run faster. This is nice if you’re panning around on a map. To enable it, repeat the process (Enable GPS will display in the menu).
Map Page
  • If you’re looking for the fastest map draw for driving, set your Orientation to North Up, choose the Street View Map Style, turn off any imagery, and zoom out to show mag 12 or .25 mile scale. 
  • Use the Measure Distance option in the Map menu to determine area by connecting the beginning and end of a polygon. You can use this to measure the acreage of a piece of land.
Trip Info Page
  • When resetting info, clear the check box next to Reset Device Odometer if you’d like to keep track of how far you’ve gone with your PN-20 during a season. Select the check box to reset the other Trip Info fields if you’d like to see those statistics for that particular trip.
Waypoints

The PN-20 Waypoints Screen

  • New waypoints are named based on your previous waypoint label. This makes it easy to mark a series of similar waypoints like “Checkpoint 001,” “Checkpoint 002,” and “Checkpoint 003.”
  • Change the symbol for a waypoint to mark it as completed, and then use Delete By Symbol from the Waypoints list menu to delete your completed points. Use this to delete found geocaches from your cache list.
Tracks
  • Save your tracks after completing your trips; it will give you clean tracks when you view your data in Topo USA or XMap.
Routes

The PN-20 Route Points

  • Press ENTER while highlighting a point in the Route list to Move or Remove it. Press up or down on the arrow keypad to move the route point, and then press QUIT to save the change.
Sun/Moon, Tide, and Hunt/Fish
  • Pan the map to a new location before viewing the Sun/Moon, Tide, or Hunt/Fish pages to see information for that area.
Device Setup
PN-20 Owner Info

  • Be sure to enable and disable Daylight Saving Time based on where you live. This adjusts the time displayed on the PN-20.
  • Enter your owner information; it will help someone return the device to you should you lose it.
Screen Shots
  • If you would like to take screen shots of your current PN-20 display like I’ve done here, just create a folder on your SD card named “screenshots.” Each time you press the POWER button on the PN-20, a chime will sound letting you know that a screen shot has been taken. Remove the screenshots folder from the SD card when you are finished.

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Posted by Chip Noble - Design

City Caching

April 1, 2008
This weekend found me in New York, NY. I know that I live in Maine and that as such I am a bit, shall we say, removed from the mainstream, but every time I come to this city I am baffled by the sheer magnitude of it. For the record, I’m no hick living in the boonies, I grew up in Boston and I’m no stranger to city life. New York is simply an entirely different world though.
 Brian Geocaching in NYC
My best friend, Robby, grew up in Manhattan, near Times Square, and he still lives in the neighborhood he grew up in. He is a gracious host whenever I’m in town, and I am grateful for the “tour guide”. He’s good about taking me to the best local places for food and such, its great to get the NYC experience from a true New Yorker.
Whenever I travel I try to grab a geocache or two, and I thought it would be really cool to take Robby geocaching. He is the kinda guy who will never need a GPS in his life, not if they don’t have subway maps on them. I told him about geocaching, and he was, in true NYC fashion, both cynical and skeptical of it. “A treasure hunt?” he said “Am I gonna have to dig around some tree in Central Park or something?” I assured him that no excavations would be necessary, downloaded a few caches into Topo USA, edited the comments to get what I wanted, transferred them into the PN-20 and we set off for a little concrete caching in the urban canyon. I turned off all the POI’s so that the map wouldn’t be too cluttered and we headed east.
The apparent trick with caching in such an uber-urban environment is size and stealth. All the posts I’d read noted that it can be difficult to be subtle and unnoticed when seeking a cache say, near the corner of Broadway and 5th Ave, and there aren’t exactly an abundance of places to hide a standard size cache, therefore most of the caches are small or “micro”, trickier to find, but by no means impossible. I thought that the tricky part was going to be actually finding and logging the caches without drawing an inordinate amount of attention upon ourselves. I also had the thought that we might look extra suspicious to the abundance of NYPD officers in the area. I was not looking to have to explain why I was hiding a little box in a public space to a cop.
Robbie Caching for the First Time 
I had, however, forgotten the fact that nothing looks odd to a New Yorker, a knowledge which Robby took full advantage of. In searching for one cache he was basically climbing around on a piece of industrial artwork in a small park in the Chelsea neighborhood. This was when I realized city-boy skeptic Robby had gotten into the “treasure hunt”. While this was a gratifying moment for me, it was not brought to full fruition due to the fact that we were unable to actually locate the cache. In reviewing the logs I’d read that several other cachers had been unable to find it over the previous few days. Noting that the space between the artwork and the wall behind it was apparently someone’s “home”, we decided that the probability of this cache being corrupted was pretty high, and moved on.
The second cache we were going after was in the Flatiron district, a short walk away. The hints were very important on this one; unfortunately I did a poor job editing the comments and the last couple of hints were cut off on the PN-20. Robby was holding the answer in his hands: IPhone. I sat on a nearby bench and signed into Geocaching.com to view the hints while Robby went running around with the PN-20, getting as close to the cache as possible. I thought that a fun role reversal. We were successful in locating and logging the cache, and Robby decided that Geocaching was cool and tried to hit me up for a PN-20. I told him I might be able to get him a good price.
Our caching for the day completed we headed off for Chinatown in search of excellent fried dumplings. I was tempted to use the PN-20 to do a POI search, but I relied on Robby’s instincts instead. I was not disappointed.
Until next time…
-Brian

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