Pineapple Dan

I'd love to go but won't know if I'll be around that day for another while

Except it didn't really cost $50, it really costs several $100 but you pay a small bit off every month on some rip off 'plan' and in return they also get to SIM lock your device (unless its Verizon then things are even worse), load it with crippled firmware and lock it down as they please. still wouldn't pay $700 for a Garmin though. unless it had a frikken' laser beam on it for remotely disabling PMOC's

Garmin eTrex (Yellow non-H) Garmin Foretrex 401 Phones Hughes (Thuraya) 7101 satellite phone w' gps Some Samsung WM6.5 thing

The Etrex is a great GPS, still have mine from 2003 it's still perfect and in many ways better than my Foretrex 401. Love the fact that it has a serial port, makes it easy to interface with PIC microcontrollers and that sort of thing. It would be sad to see that thing go. I suppose they could improve on it a bit, but change it too much and they might make a mess of it also hope they never discontinue the watch format GPS like the 401.

They will realise it as soon as they find one on the 'nearest caches' list and the site starts trying to sign them up to premium membership. Wasn't that awfully long for me I suppose eventually nearly all geocaches will be PMO, with a few easy 'trial' geocaches strewn about the place to get n00bs started

Its not so much the amount of money but the fact that I need to have money to spare to throw at some website owner before the cache owner deems I'm hardcore enough to be allowed find their cache

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Yes its going too mainstream, and this breeds premium member elitism. Before there was never such an emphasis on being a premium member, the whole thing is making me disinterested tbh. Although part of me just wants to create a whole string of non premium member caches just because free things are good. Smartphones have dumbed things down considerably, but smartphones have a dumbing down effect on society in general I think.

So ordinary users are undesirable now and unworthy of the best cache, all because they refuse to make the owner of Groundspeak.com richer? If these 'high investment' caches are getting muggled when the coordinates are available for ordinary users a minimum number of previously logged caches would seem a more fair system but Groundspeak wouldn't make any money out of that. I don't know how so many people get caught up in the whole 'supporting the site' thing. There are millions of users, ad revenue must be massive for this site (although me and a lot of people are using AdBlock). It's just another company that's out to make money not some struggling community initiative. The whole thing reminds me of Celtic Tiger Ireland, everyone who wasn't paying through the nose for everything was being peer pressured into paying up more.

Premium member caches are a terrible idea, after having been away for a while I find this site is getting far too commerical. Theres a relatively new cache in my area, for premium members only. Wtf? you are hiding some object out in the wild but only want it to be found by people who open up their credit card details to some site which isn't even theirs. Definitely elitist