The strong reception in tree cover of the Magellan Explorist 400™ makes it a popular product amongst geocachers. Programs like GSAK, the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife and GPSBabel are popular replacements for the included Geocache Manager.

Geocaches on Magellan Explorist 400™ are implemented as a special type of waypoint. These waypoints can have longer names, but they also contain the container type, the difficulty, terrain, and up to 50 characters of the hint as well as the ability to be turned off and on in bulk and the abilty to mark them as 'found' on the unit.

Geocaches (loaded as .gs files) can not be edited on the handheld and are limited to 200 POIs per file.

A point can be marked with either, of course, but geocaching mode allows extra geocache-specific information like the date of last find, the geocache type, the placer's name, and a hint to be stored in the GPS. Additionally, you can mark a cache 'found' to make it easily disappear from the map.

Geocaches are stored in the 'My Geocaches' directory instead of "My POIs' and must have names that end in ".gs" instead of '.upt'. The contents of the file are also different to reflect the additional data in them.

In addition to Magellan's Geocache Manager that came with the unit, GSAK and GPSBabel know how to create files suitable for geocaching mode.

Yes. These files may be dragged and dropped upon the GM icon to open. Alternately, you can use the programs mentioned above.

Only the first 50 characters of the hint will be displayed. This will seem like enough until the first time you're stuck in the woods with a cacache you can't find and click on the hint to find the first 50 characters are "Haha, Made you look. I can't belive you didn't lo"

Up to 200 at a time may be loaded.The device will actually allow .gs files larger than that, but only 200 points in the file are kept. You can have multiple files on the unit and switch between them as you wish.

To activate file on GPS, select menu->preferences->active setup->geocaches/select file. Geocache POIs will display on screen disctinct from regular POIs.

No, you can not edit the text of a geocache entry; that must be done from a computer by changing the *.gs file. If you want to edit the waypoint in the field (perhaps you're entering coords for a puzzle solution or a multi) you should create a user point of interest instead as thos are editable.

Geocache Manager has a defect where names that are not sufficiently unique when being sent to the GPS will be dropped.