Kohavis

It's also OK with travel bugs to place them anywhere you can find a cache large enough to hold them, whether it's your hide or someone else's makes no difference to the trackable's "mission"

Excellent advice, and something I wish I had done before placing my first hides.

Your best bet is probably to find out if there is a local or state geocaching club or other organization. Then you should contact them or post in their forum (if they have one). Geocachers are quite generous and willing to spend some time to help a newbie learn the ropes

Pocket queries should be in the form of an e-mail with a .zip file attached. You unzip it and you get a .gpx file for the caches and another for the additional waypoints (parking, trailheads, etc.). It sounds like you did your query wrong and it didn't output anything. Can you post an example of which boxes you checked when you ran the query?

WHOA! That's scary stuff, Star*Hopper! Good to hear you came away without a bite

I usually stop in here several times a day to catch up. Morning, afternoon, middle of the night, etc. I usually don't complain about forums loading slow, but it seems the forum here is getting worse these last few weeks. At times I have to click on a topic I want to read, then open another Firefox tab so I can go off and do something else while I wait the 5 to 10 minutes it takes to load. A little while ago I had to give up because it didn't load at all - it just hung. Other times I'll post a new topic and the topic is there, but my post isn't. This has happened to a number of members here. What is going on, and is there relief in the near future for us? (I'm posting this here because there seems to be a forum for reporting problems with geocaching.com but none for Groundspeak.com).

I also recommend the Venture HC if you want inexpensive, and not having true paperless caching isn't a show-stopper. If money was no object there are several units out there that'll do it all. But you'll pay dearly for it. StarBrand's suggestion is the best of both worlds - an inexpensive but good GPSr and a cheapo used PDA The downside is having two things to carry, but for many that's not a big deal.

I'm going to call you on this one. We can either visit or not. If they start defining visiting by certain actions or body motions they are in the wrong business. No. They are protecting their property and their patrons by keeping the "riff raff" out. You would too. Someone doing the "geocacher drunken bee dance" holding a GPSr, or rubbing down the underside of a bench, or feeling up a maple tree, is obviously not there to pay their respects to the dead. It's pretty obvious

Convince your friend to join geocaching.com and let HIM log it as a find

Remember that some reviewers require a "wow factor" before they'll publish a cache. If it's merely by a tree or something in your front yard, they may feel that there's not enough in the way of "scenic, cultural or historic significance" to approve it. I believe it falls under their "cache saturation" guidelines. Other reviewers won't care. It's a gamble, but you have nothing to lose. Personally I don't mind if a cache doesn't have a stunning view or isn't located behind the third-oldest cottonwood tree in the county, for example. I think a yard cache is a fine idea

I think you're talking about signature items in general. "Geocards" is just one flavor of those. Some veteran cachers make (or have made) personalized little tokens of their visits. Some say "Please don't trade - leave for cache owner". Others are intended to be exchanged like swag. They're usually in the form of custom-made wooden nickels, ceramic coins, aluminum coins, ceramic hand-painted animal faces with the cacher's info on the back, almost anything is good as long as it's personal. And I would leave out your home coordinates if I were you I've seen business cards left in caches. I don't really like those, as they seem too much like spamming, especially if it's the person's own business. But what you're talking about sounds like a good idea. I personally use handmade rectangular wood tokens that I have woodburned, stained and varnished. They're a little more interesting than cards, which I suspect most people would ignore.

My best is 11 finds in one day. And I wasn't trying for the numbers, I was just out having a nice cache hunt on a beautiful day. I'm sure I could have done a lot more, but then it stops being fun and becomes more like work

Not an issue for me. I looked once and I don't think there is a single PM-only cache here in Albuquerque. But if I were still a Basic Member I wouldn't have a problem with PMOCs if there were any here. Just one more perk of being a premium member, along with pocket queries, unlimited watch lists, instant notifications, etc.

Not surprising they're so close in price. $250 for the eTrex Legend HCx is WAY too much to pay!! Here's a link to someone who is selling a new one with free shipping for $169: http://cgi.ebay.com/GARMIN-ETREX-LEGEND-HC...id=p3286.c0.m14

You can't make it bigger from this end. The source pic must be bigger before you post the link in IMG tags. One way to do it is a little work, but it'll get the job done: 1. Go to the pic source web page and right-click it. 2. Select "Save Image As" and point to a hard disk location. 3. Open an editor like Paint or Photoshop and resize it larger. For forums try to limit the max. dimensions to something under 800 or 900 pixels wide or else the page layout will be broken, and scroll bars will appear. Not good. 4. Upload to a free file hosting service like Photobucket. Copy the "Image Code" link from that site and paste in the post, or grab the "URL" (http:// ...") and paste inside image tags in your post.

Brilliant pic!!! Now I'm going to have to clean the coffee off my monitor

I guarantee you I am not walking 3mph in order to get the compass to work on my Venture HC... usually I only have to take ONE step for it to change. IMO, the electronic compass is an upgraded feature, not a necessary one. I have the Venture HC and I agree. One step and it usually updates. It's not much of an inconvenience for me

Apparently the forum had a meltdown while I was posting this - the OP disappeared. I got an e-mail over the weekend from a newbie cacher who apparently got confused a bit. He was caching in the Rio Grande Nature Center, a place that has many caches, including one of mine. It appears that the newbie cacher read the description on my cache while locating a different cache, realized that the cache hide didn't fit the description, then attempted to re-hide" the cache so it was closer to where he thought it belonged - in a more woodsy setting. I contacted the real cache owner and sent him a copy of the e-mail, and he's going to try contacting this newbie cacher and find out exactly what he did. In the meantime, his cache is likely unavailable because it has been moved. No doubt the cache owner will need to make a maintenance visit just to restore his cache to where it belongs. All this because someone was reading the wrong description while out caching I understand that he was only trying to help, in the spirit of geocaching. But people just starting out in geocaching need to remember the cardinal rule - don't alter a cache unless the cache owner is aware of it, and approves. This has been a Public Service Announcement of Kohavis, from the Land Of Enchantment

It's safe

That sounds like the on-screen text directions while you're in map mode. Apparently you marked a new waypoint "001" - the default name. A better way to find a cache would be to switch to compass mode. That shows a big red pointer in a compass ring, and in the upper right tells you how far away your target is.

Cemeteries are rarely public property. Arlington National comes to mind. Most are privately owned by a local diocese, a church, or as a private business. People are welcome there because it's understood that they're going to visit a loved one, and it's considered "tacky" to card people at the gate. Someone skulking around a cemetery, obviously not visiting a grave, is trespassing.

I treat them like swag, but the interesting ones I set aside for my collection. Soon I'll be leaving my own handmade sig item in every cache that'll hold it, so I won't feel bad about removing a few here and there that strike my fancy

My last cache run I went after 11. At the end I had found 8 and DNF-ed 2 with one cache to look for. I searched all over and didn't find it. In the past my first instinct is that it's gone, but time and time again when I add comments to that effect in the log, someone comes along after me and logs "Quick find" As usual, it was just me. So on this one I logged: Two days later the cache owner visited the hide and it was gone. Some kids had built a fort out of tree branches close to GZ and apparently muggled the cache. The CO archived it since it was a unique container

Came across this guy about a month ago while on a cache hunt. He was casually making his way across the trail. It's a non-venomous bull snake.

I have the Venture HC and I can't give you a comparison to other units since this is my first. I can tell you that there is a slight bug with the unit software version 2.7 that is fixed with 2.8. It shows as a distance error - the odometer (trip computer) shows the total distance about 10 - 15% higher than the autotrack total. If you run Web Updater and update to 2.8 it solves the problem nicely. I took a hike two days ago with the new software installed. The two are now in almost perfect agreement. As for the heavy tree cover performance, I don't have any complaints. A considerable percentage of my finds are in heavy tree cover and it doesn't seem to mind. It usually takes me to within 20 feet or so of the hide in the heaviest cover. That number drops to about 10 feet with a clear view of the sky. There again, that is dependent on the hider's accuracy when he recorded the coordinates. Your accuracy will usually be no better than his when he hid it ...unless you have a rare error that exactly counteracts his error when he hid it. That's why waypoint averaging is so important when hiding (a feature the Venture HC has, by the way). I usually let it run continuously until the error is down to 7 feet or so. That may be 20 or 30 measurements. Then I save it. That at least doesn't add additional error to someone who is searching for the cache.