Garmin has come up with a new way of making money while simultaneously giving geocachers something new to play with. It’s called a Chirp, and it’s a wireless beacon!

Anyone who’s been a geocacher for more than 5 minutes has been asked the question “is there a GPS in the cache?”. I don’t know why people would even think that, but at least with this new product from Garmin there’s a bit of electronic gadget in the cache. A Chirp is basically a tiny battery powered doohickey that sits in a cache and transmits data every couple of seconds. If you have one of the newer models of Garmin GPSr, it will be able to detect the Chirp when it’s within about 10 meters. The point is to store information like real cache coordinates, hints etc in the Chirp and have it be accessible on the GPSr when in range.

Some cachers hate this concept for all it’s worth since it’s tied to one brand (though it’s an open standard). It excludes people with old or non-Garmin GPSrs, it promotes Garmin yad-di-yad-da. The former is a rather idiotic argument as a shitload of caches exclude some users. Mystery caches that require a high IQ or math skills, multicaches that require a car etc. Just because handicapped people can’t find a forest cache or people who are bad at math can’t solve a mystery cache doesn’t mean those caches shouldn’t be there. After all, the cache owners pay for the caches themselves and do all the work, so it should be up to them what they do with it. There’s still plenty of room on the planet for caches, so no need to be picky yet.

As for promoting a brand, well guess what- someone always have to be first with a new feature. Geocaching is a very middle aged heavy hobby, and unfortunately that means there’s quite a few cachers who couldn’t turn off the screen lock if you handed them a touch screen phone. With the massive new feature sets introduced to geocaching by smartphones and recent generation GPSrs it’s going to cause more than a few grey hairs in the skulls of those people.

Anyways, that’s what the Chirp is. I bought some stuff from Amazon through a friend recently and the Chirp was a last-minute throw. I probably won’t get to use it until spring (the cold here in winter would kill either it or the battery) but it will be fun to play with when that happens, especially since there are only one (or a few) such caches in Norway yet. Where I’ll put it and whether it will be Chirp only I don’t know, but I’m going to archive many of my “tourist caches” and focus more on elaborate caches anyways so whatever I do it won’t be an LPC.