Paperless Geocaching & Chirp With The Garmin Oregon 450t

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Quick tutorial on how to do paperless geocaching using either geocaching.com or opencaching.com as a listing service.

First thing is to connect the device to our computer via USB and to go to geocaching.com or opencaching.com to find listings to transfer.

While geocaching.com offer more listings, you will need to pay for premium membership to download the entire listing content. On the other hand opencaching.com is free and you can download the entire listing for free.

Once loaded, we can change our profile to geocaching on the device. This will rearrange the buttons and certain screens to be more useful for geocaching. You can further customize if required.

The compass page is probably the screen where you will spend most of your time. By tapping areas on the screen, you'll be able to access the geocache listing information while you navigate to it.

In this video, I'll show you how to program a chirp using your garmin Oregon 450.

We'll go over how to turn on chirp searching on the GPS, then detect the chirp.

Initially, you would want to program it in order to pair it to your GPS so that nobody else can use it. Chirps, once programmed cannot be programmed by other GPS units.

I recommend that you have your waypoint/geocache ready to send to the chirp, only because sometimes you can lose the connection and that is a pain when you are entering the name or message again and again.

Once you discovered your chirp, you can change the name, send a waypoint or geocache, send a message or erase the chirp.

If you need to reprogram a chirp, I would recommend erasing it first then send the new information.

Once it is programmed, the type of information that you can view are the following:


Name (9 characters)
Coordinates for the next stage
Message/hint (50 characters)
Date of previous connection
Number of successful connection attempts since last programming
Low battery warning (if applicable)
Serial number

You can detect a chirp from up to 100 feet away in certain conditions, but 20-30 feet seems to be the typical range. It works best when the top or side of the chirp is facing the user.

For example, you can't place the chirp behind a road sign where the chirp is next to (behind) the metal. Better placement is below or at the top of the post.

In fact the higher, the better. Since it is a radio beacon, having good height will allow the signal to travel further. Placement where the user can walk past it while downloading the information works best for experience.

You can't detect more than one chirp at a time, but the chirp can send out a signal to multiple units. However, for best results a single GPS at a time works best.

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