Geomate Jr. Geocaching GPS

This is my first foray into GPS units. We have bought four of them to set up a "private" geocache experience for our middle school campers this summer. Campers will find the locations and find/observe the information to answer a question. If they find them all and answer the question (they are not tough), they will get a nice pins with our camp logo and GPS coordinates. Our test runs with some kids have been very positive. Get at least one combo pack, if you want to do this. My definition of easy to use is "I can just quickly figure it out without reading the instructions." I sense I am "smarter than the average bear", then others we get it with very little instruction. I had to read the quick start guide and it got me going. Since I waws not interested to "public" geocache sites, there was a little bit of learning curve to set up our own. That said the units are great. Simple and clean. Not many controls and I think tech savvy kids will master it quickly. And of course it is economical and I am not worried about it getting trashed . . . at least not too much. I compare the satelite lock speed to Windows booting up; it feels a little slow compared to my car's Tom-Tom. Accuracy has not been an issue in finding our GPS markers. They are great units for our purpose.

This is an update to my first review, below...Apisphere responded to my email concern, same day, and on a Saturday at that. Using the update kit required us to turn off Norton Utilities to run the update. It worked and we were off and running. It's been muddy in our area so we have simply stopped by a place that we know there are caches and tested out our new Geomate Jr. Worked like a charm. Gave us cache size, terrain, distance, and pointed us in the right direction. We can't wait to put it to field use.Original post: We received our Geomate Jr two days ago. It may be a great device, however, you need the update kit. The update kit does not work with Windows 7 or Vista. We found that out today. See my review there. This item will be returned if a software fix is not in place. Awaiting response from Apisphere Help Desk.

Bought this for my wife and my first experience with Geocaching. It works like a charm! I am sure there are better, more pricey GPS systems, but this works and is easy to use. The best part is that you don't have to download info into the GPS, you can just turn it on wherever you are and you will be able to scroll through the closest 20 caches and travel to any of them. You can also input your own coordinates for specific caches from geocaching.com to create your own list and upload it with the cable (not included). Would not work for night caching as there is no backlighting and when I first turn it on it takes several minutes to lock on to the satellites, but these are my only 2 gripes. Overall I love it and would recommend it to anyone looking to get into Geocaching!

The Geomate Jr. is our first entry into geocaching. The unit itself locks onto satellites within 1 minute on a clear day and approximately 3 minutes on a cloudy, rainy day. There is a bit of a learning curve to navigate the screens with only two buttons. The unit appears to be accurate to about 5 feet.The lack of mapping capability is not an issue for us. I check the maps at [...] for an area with caches. We drive to the area, then turn on the unit to find the nearest caches. The one additional feature I wish it had was the ability to input coordinates.Overall the Geomate Jr. performs very well for geocaching at a good price point for the beginner geocacher.

This is our first GPS (besides the window mounted ones for cars). I got this for our family to start geocaching. The GPS works great, all you do is turn it on and go. My 4 year old can follow the arrow to the cache. It dose take about 2-5 mins to first link up. The geocache jr. will bring you with in 5 feet of the grab even in tree cover. It doesn't have all the other gizmo's as the other ones but it dose what it's designed for well. I would recommend this to anyone that wants to get into geocaching or is.

The Apisphere Geomate Jr was the hit of our family Christmas. Luckily, we have had some warm days here in January, because my 7 year old son has been so excited to use this awesome geocaching GPS unit. It has opened up a whole new realm of family entertainment. Gone are the days of lounging on the couch watching TV. We've had a blast going all over our tri-state area finding geocaches. We couldn't be more pleased with this purchase. The unit comes pre-loaded with thousands of caches, but you should probably get the update software also, because there were some caches on the internet that did not come up in the unit until we updated it. Love, love, love this product!

It is terrible. You can not load pocket queries, you can't do anything. My two girls are constantly asking for my iPhone or MY GPS. I would give it less stars, but the company that owns it now is not the designer and they are clearly selling out of their stock.

My girlfriend and I have had a couple of these geomate jrs. We dropped one and it broke, which wasn't fun since we were out of town on a specific geocaching trip. Sadly, Amazon is the only place we can find them now, we used to just get them at Target but they discontinued them. This product is so simple. We recently bought two from Amazon because we just love this GPS. We thought about buying a more advanced brand but we just like the ease of this GPS. It will lead you where you need to go (sometimes you have to turn it off and back on to get accuracy) but it does the job. If you are expecting this GPS to guide you right to it and you won't have to look or anything, then this is not the GPS for you. In our opinion that would be soooo incredibly boring to do that. We LOVE the search. The Geomate is the perfect beginner GPS, my gf's nephew that is in second grade can use it with ease. He doesn't always understand the distance but we help him. Happy geocaching!

no support to operate unit, no return and waste of time and money