The Green Bag

Shortly after we got involved in Geocaching, we purchased a Magellan eXplorist 100 GPS receiver (GPSr), which has served us faithfully for almost two years. Unfortunately, we started having a problem with the display a couple of months ago, and despite trying everything including checking all of the menu settings, we couldn't figure out why it wasn't working right.

We've been looking at different units from both Magellan and Garmin for some time now, and had pretty much settled on the Magellan eXplorist 210. It's very similar to the 100 model, except that it adds built-in road maps and the best Geocaching features we could find.

Teri and the girls got me one of these for Father's Day. Of course, while working through the menus on the new unit, I found something worth trying on the old eXplorist 100, and sure enough, the only thing wrong with it was that the contrast setting was messed up. I'm not sure how I missed that before, but now we have two working GPSr units, which we've kinda wanted, anyway.

Not only does the software for the eXplorist 210 make it really easy to transfer Geocaching.com waypoint files, but this unit follows the recent (and enjoyable) trend of making USB devices appear as an additional disk drive in WindowsXP. File management on the 210 is therefore pretty simple, and all data is stored in easy to edit CSV text files.

I like the fact that I can store waypoints and geocaches in multiple files and folders on the GPSr. The list on my eXplorist 100 got pretty long, and finding things by scrolling could get pretty tedious. On the eXplorist 210, I can select a point from any file, and only points from the current "active" files are shown on the map display.

Buying maps for GPS receivers can be pretty expensive, which is one of the reasons why we went with the 100 to start. I could buy maps for the eXplorist 210, but I was pleasantly surprised by the level of detail available in the built-in firmware maps. Not only does it show all Interstate and US highways, but it also contains state highways and other "major roads".

The route handling features are also improved over the 100.

This turned out to be a great upgrade, and I'm sure the eXplorist 210 will meet my geocaching and travel needs for a long, long time.