Navigation, Geocaching and More with a TomTom GO 710
6 Comments Published by Kev February 4th, 2007 in geekdom, reviews, tech
If you’ve been watching my Flickr photos lately, you’ll have noticed that Jess and I are getting into geocaching, the world-wide treasure hunt where participants follow GPS coordinates to the locations of hidden caches of goodies.
The one essential tool for geocaching is a GPS receiver (GPSr), which gave me the perfect excuse to add this long-coveted piece of technology to my car. But finding a unit that would make a good on-road navigator (with good maps, nice screen, useful routing features, and an extensive Points of Interest (POI) database) as well as a good tool for geocaching (offering accurate coordinates and useful off-road navigation features) would prove to be a challenge.
The conventional wisdom seemed to be that the combination of a Pocket PC or other Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and a Bluetooth GPSr would provide the most flexible solution, allowing me to use different software and maps for each type of navigation. But despite my rampant geekiness and confessed addiction to gadgets, I just didn’t need another computer in my life. I wanted a purpose-built gadget that I could rely on while driving, and that Jess and I could pass back and forth while out hunting for a geocache.
Also on my wish list was a device that could record position tracks that I could later use to automatically geocode photos (embedding position information into the file) that I took while out and about. Since none of the sub-$1,000 in-car GPSr units on the market offered this feature (you have to either spend a lot of money, or get a GPSr designed for hiking), it seemed like I’d have to shell out another $200 or so for a device like the Sony GPSCS1 built specifically for this purpose.
In the end, however, I found everything I needed and more in the TomTom GO 710 portable GPS car navigator. All it took was a little rampant geekiness.
In my next few posts, I’ll describe both the built-in features of the device that led me to choose it as an in-car navigator, as well as the tricky hacks and add-ons that have enabled us to take it geocaching and more.
Hi. Also got a 710 and new to geocaching. Curious to see how i can combine both into the same hobby. Any additional info would be grand. Thanks
Shug
Dear sir, madam,
Our company, Mobilnova.com, is the maker of Media Center for TomTom, a media player software that allows playback of video and MP3 audio on the whole range of TomTom portable navigation devices.
We would like to propose to review our software in your publication. In return we can offer special discounts to you readers and provide a special demo version of our software at your web site or include it on the CD distributed to your readers.
We would be glad to provide a full version of Media Center for TomTom for review purposes.
We are looking forward to your reply.
Best regards,
Dennis
Mobilnova Team
Hello. Have you been able to add geocache descriptions and logs to your gps? I am also curious about the approach you have taken with this. I have a tomtom 720.
I’m also interested in setup as I have a Tom Tom 720. I actually use a Garmin MAP 60CSX for caching, but was looking to download waypoints into my 720 for route planning/etc. Have you been able to do this. Thanks for any feedback… I’m just starting to look at the forums. You might also want to look at the http://www.geocaching.com forums if you’re still having any issues… like I said, I’m just getting started on this quest!
I found that garmin product is of high quality albeit the price is also a bit high but it’s worth paying.
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