Garmin Chirp: The Geocacher's Aide-de-Camp

Attention, geocachers! Garmin has a new device that may be worth your while. It’s called the chirp (yup, lowercase “c”), and it works in conjunction with Garmin phones to ensure a “more interactive and enjoyable geocaching experience.” Sounds fun. Not that I’ve ever been geocaching, but it seems like a swell way to spend an afternoon. It certainly beats trolling message boards all day long.

Chirp, which is available now (for $22.99), is described thus by Garmin’s Dan Bartel, vice-president of worldwide sales:

With Chirp, geocachers have a new tool to enhance the joys of creating and finding caches around the globe. In listening to and participating in the vibrant geocaching community, Garmin created a one-of-a-kind device that builds on popular innovations such as paperless geocaching and downloading cache details directly to the device.

And as you know, geocaching is basically a form of treasure hunting. You walk about the earth with a GPS, aided by geocaching Web sites, and find little bundles of stuff all over the place.

It sounds ludicrous at the outset, but what doesn’t? It’s certainly no sillier than becoming the “mayor” of a café because you’ve “checked into” it more times than anyone else.

The chirp is tiny, described by Garmin as “slightly bigger than a quarter.” It transmits geocaching data to your Garmin handheld device, things like coordinates, how many times a cache has been found before, hints, etc.

It’s your geocaching companion~!

I don’t know, it seems neat. Geocaching is so not my scene, but it sounds delightful.