Groundspeak Portal

Hello I am new to the whole owning a GPS so I studied and finally came up with the Garmin 60CSx. so here is my question: When I am on a map and I see something I want to mark on the map I hit enter and I fill in all the information what I want to call the waypoint, icon etc. I will have about an accuracy of about 12-9ft every time but when I go back at a later day to revisit the spot marked the mark is off about 100ft or so when I am standing right next to it. Then on other days it could be off 50ft and so on and so forth. What is the cause of this. Like I said I am new to all of this so talk dumb to me lol like 3rd grade level lol. Thanks for any help you can provide.

Kev

factors for inaccurate coords:

satellite position
Nearby obstructions (buildings, trees, power lines)
weather (clear sky is different tha cloudy/rain/snow)

another thing to try is let the GPS 'settle'. leave it where you want the 'coords' and wait a few minutes.

all in all I have seen some really bad coords for caches and waymarks. just getting them as close as you can is the best you can do.....and there will always be someone to come along to say their coords are better, but if too many people say they are off you might want to loot at them.

you have a garmin, does it not have a 'make the best point' option where it takes like 50 points and averages them out?

v11d2003:

Hello I am new to the whole owning a GPS so I studied and finally came up with the Garmin 60CSx. so here is my question: When I am on a map and I see something I want to mark on the map I hit enter and I fill in all the information what I want to call the waypoint, icon etc. I will have about an accuracy of about 12-9ft every time but when I go back at a later day to revisit the spot marked the mark is off about 100ft or so when I am standing right next to it. Then on other days it could be off 50ft and so on and so forth. What is the cause of this. Like I said I am new to all of this so talk dumb to me lol like 3rd grade level lol. Thanks for any help you can provide.

Kev

One of my friends needed to update their GPS unit's firmware. I also suggest that you turn on WAAS if it is not already on.

One other thing you can try is to perform a 'factory reset'. First back-up all of your waypoints. Then with the power off, press and hold the PAGE and ENTER keys at the same time and turn it on, still holding the two buttons. It is best to do this in a large field with 20+ minutes where you will leave the GPS not moving (I never do this.. a few minutes seems to work just fine)

BQ

v11d2003:

Hello I am new to the whole owning a GPS so I studied and finally came up with the Garmin 60CSx. so here is my question: When I am on a map and I see something I want to mark on the map I hit enter and I fill in all the information what I want to call the waypoint, icon etc. I will have about an accuracy of about 12-9ft every time but when I go back at a later day to revisit the spot marked the mark is off about 100ft or so when I am standing right next to it. Then on other days it could be off 50ft and so on and so forth. What is the cause of this. Like I said I am new to all of this so talk dumb to me lol like 3rd grade level lol. Thanks for any help you can provide.

Kev

One of my GPSes is a 60Cx, the same as yours but without the compass and barometric altimeter.
My  most recent cache hide was 120 feet off. Then I got a waymark's coords wrong by 100 feet.
I paid closer attention and it had to do with the fact that I'd just turned the unit on. When it first gets a satellite lock, the accuracy is really bad, like 150'.

Like someone else said, keep the unit as still as possible until the accuracy or the coordinate readout stops changing. Then mark your point. Someone else mentioned averaging, and I've done that in the past, but there doesn't seem to be much difference in practice between letting it settle BEFORE you mark the point or averaging AFTER you mark the point.

And the person that mentioned firmware was right. You may not have realized it, but that probably should have been the first thing you did. Go to Garmin and get webupdater for your computer and use it to check that your GPS has the latest firmware. And do it twice, just for good measure: there's two kinds of firmware in the 60: gps firmware (for the gps chip) and unit firmware (for the menus and functions and stuff). Webupdater will do them both, but I've had it miss the gps firmware before, so run it twice.