First, CONGRATULATIONS on a great new toy. Its too bad you can't "play" with it more, eh?? My family bought ours because we thought it to be a relatively small price to pay for the safety it brought us when heading out into less traveled areas.

From looking at the Fast Find manual on-line, it looks like you should be able to get a good test of the GPS right though the yellow cover. The GPS antenna is underneath the "GPS Zone" label shown in the manual, and being plastic the yellow cover shouldn't really interfere with the GPS signal.

One note - the McMurdo FastFind manual is so much nicer than the manual that came with my ACR TerraFix. I would have thought ACR could have spent a little more money on providing a good manual with photos and at least better diagrams.

I would REALLY like to know if the GPS chip set in the FastFind is one of the older ones or one of the newer high-sensitivity ones. I can't find any info on that in either Doug's write-up or on McMurdo's web site. I would hope it is a newer one since they can obtain GPS fixes under amazingly poor conditions (fairly often my Garmin GPSMAP 60CSx can get a fix from the center of the first floor of my house - amazing.