Gadget Gets You Off the Couch and on the Hunt

Go on a high-tech treasure hunt with Apisphere's Geomate Jr.

ByABC News
November 24, 2009, 6:05 PM

Dec. 4, 2009— -- Apisphere's Geomate Jr., available online and at various retailers for $70, is a device designed to be easy to use right out of the box, especially for children and novice geocachers.

Geocaching is an outdoor pastime: members of a global community of geocachers hide objects and then post their whereabouts online for others to find using GPS-enabled devices such as Geomate Jr.

The objects, or "geocaches," can vary in size from a film canister to a tackle box; each generally contains a sort of visitors' log for people to write notes in.

The claim on Geomate Jr.'s packaging is that with only three steps, one can be geocaching right away.

Step 1: Go outside.

Step 2: Switch it on.

Step 3: Follow the arrow & distance to your closest geocache!

Well, it's not quite that simple. When I first opened the box, I was determined to try out the Geomate Jr. by following only these three steps to verify their claim.

The first hiccup was that I went outside, and tried to turn it on, but nothing happened. So it was back inside to find two AAA batteries to put inside.

Back in the game, I'm on my way to find my first geocache. The Geomate Jr. tells me I'm less than 2,000 feet from it and, boy, is it satisfying to see that number shrink rapidly with every step!

Once it displays six feet, I start to get excited and I keep moving until it displays exactly zero feet from the cache. However, after a fruitless search of a two-foot radius, I give up and go back home. It's time to read the instruction manual.

The most important piece of information came not from the instruction manual, but from a letter addressed to me, as a reviewer, written by an Apisphere employee: "You will have to actually hunt for the hidden geocache! When I get to the general location of the geocache, say less than 20 ft., I put the GPS down and look around and ask myself, 'Where would I hide something here?'"

To be fair, this is stated in the manual, but that quote really helped me succeed when I went out to try and find that first cache again.