ANT Forum

I have thirty years of programming experience but I'm brand new to ANT. I am trying to fix a Garmin Chirp using an ANT stick and ANTware II. I'm hoping that someone with more ANT experience will coach me through the setup and save me from reading another 200 pages of documentation.

For those who don't know, geocaching is a treasure hunt game that you play with a GPS coordinates. It started back in 2000 with consumer handheld GPS units. Now most people play using smartphones. A Chirp is an ANT-based product from Garmin that's specifically for geocaching. You leave the Chirp outside and it sends a signal that certain Garmin GPS devices can receive. Typically they broadcast GPS coordinates and hints about how to find whatever thing you're looking for. There is an ANT+ profile for geocaching devices.

I am a geocacher and I decided to experiment with a Chirp about two years ago in 2016. The Chirp worked fine for a while and then it ran into trouble. It seems to have lost some of the programmable data pages. It has also lost the PIN that I used to program it, so I can no longer fix it using my GPS. I have two theories. One is that the device had trouble with its memory. I have read that they're flaky sometimes. The other is that someone showed up with an ANT tool on an Android phone and overwrote the information, probably by accident.

All I want to do is reset the Chirp so I can program it with my GPS again. I have installed ANTware II and skimmed through the documentation for it. I have read the ANT+ geocache device profile several times. I am working my way through ANT Message Protocol and Usage Rev 5.1.

My objective is to open a channel with the Chirp and write a main data page that shows the device is ready to be programmed. I think I have the channel configured correctly in ANTware II but I don't seem to be getting any data from the Chirp. I know that the Chirp is broadcasting because I can see that much from my GPS unit. I think I must have something wrong in the configuration.

Any advice is appreciated.      

Five minutes after I posted this I found the answer. ANTware II was the wrong tool. Reprogramming the Chirp was a snap to do with SimulANT+. There is actually a button to press that says "Erase Geocache."      

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