Geocaching@pt

Hello,

I know this forum is in Portuguese but unfortunately my Portuguese is not so good.
I would like to buy a handheld GPS. I've been looking at webshops and they all have some Garmin GPS. But I can't find any maps for Portugal (only city navigator, and I dont' know if that is sufficient voor geocaching).

So my question is simple: What kind of GPS are you using, are you satisfied and what maps?
Please answer in English, Swedish or Dutch (google translate is nice but not good enough).

Thanks,
Ingrid

Hi Ingrid,

I think that answering in Dutch or Swedish would be a first in this forum - but we can try to do it in English.

First of all, thanks for reaching out to us. You are doing one of the million dollar questions, though! I can only tell you that I use a 4 years old Garmin Oregon and an iPhone with the official app - and I am happy with both of them.

If you are looking for Portuguese topo maps, I would recommend you to have a look at https://sites.google.com/site/topolusitania/ - a freeware Portuguese topo map. You can follow the conversation (a bit old, let me tell you) in viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7844&p=135028&hilit=topolusitania#p111989 (in Portuguese, though).

I use a Dakota10 (used to use a Etex) with both topolusitania (as recommended by Lynx) and with the Open Street Maps for Portugal.
It´s more than enougth I think, for Geocaching of course.
Probably, if you are not goint toooo of the main trails and into the mountains or so, the Topolusitania will sufice.

Hi! welcome to the forum. I have a Dakota 20. Before this one I used a Garmin Legend Hcx. I have(had) topolusitania on both of them but rarely used the map, but it was good to have it sometimes when a choice had to be made about the best path to a cache. This would happen mostly on "mountain" terrain.
City navigator would be enough most of the times. I guess it depends on where you will be caching.

I used to use a garmin etrex 30 that I had for mountain hiking and mountain biking and recently I have started with my wife at the cyclo camping. I prepare my itineraries then I send them on the gps and on the return I recover the data to really see the route made, the difference in altitude...old MIO Cyclo 300 glued from everywhere. Its main quality is its simplicity of use and the ease of copying the tracks on websites or vice versa, on the other hand it has only the background map of France and impossible to put more.

Since two years I ride with a Garmin Edge Touring that I found through the comparative Mi Deporte, it has all the maps of Europe but to retrieve the tracks for a website or vice versa you have to go through the Garmin Express software that does not work with all browsers.
To sum up, I navigate with the Garmin and every night I retrieve the track on the Mio to paste it on the map of my site.