TEAM HARTSOCK

Love it or hate it....it's up to you, but I got it in the mail and had fun with my youngest daughter as we cached in the rain to earn it. When I showed it to her, she was thrilled!

There are a bunch of them on the Hide & Seek a Cache page, lower-right. link Thats all I use. You can cut and paste it, change the size and color of the font, personalize it with your gc name and the cache number, etc. Easy to use.

Missing TBs and coins do not come from a burdensome system of logging; they come from carelessness and laziness along with the good old, "I like this one maybe I will keep it" attitude. It will happen no matter how many shortcuts or improvements are made to the system. As a cache owner and TB owner, I want my bugs to keep moving and want my caches to reflect what is in them; so I put the time and effort into making sure they are maintained and cared for, but there is only so much you can do.

You did what you felt was the right thing. Though others may give you grief over that, I respect you for it. But, I wouldn't want this to become a habit. If it becomes regular that geocaches get stolen and auctioned, I am sure Ebay will have an issue with it. Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Had this been a cache that had just gotten muggled and then shown up on ebay there would have been no action taken from me other than to report it. But as the story goes, this cache disappeared from when the newspaper machines were removed. This guy's father found it when he was (I am assuming) scrapping them for the metal or scavenging them for parts, whatever... The guy wasn't a cache theif, just not a nice guy in thinking of how to help someone in a little way. Log book would have barely cost the price of a stamp, but the guy couldn't see fit to do that. I think that and also the way he screwed me over with the shipping shows something there, but not necessarly a cache thief. I don't deal with (cache) terrorists, but every now and then you have a situation where it's necessary to send in Bill Clinton.

Okay, so I bought this...just contacted the owner for address to send him the log or the whole thing...whatever he wants. If he doesn't want the cache and just the log, I plan on incorporating the old cache into a new one that is themed along the lines of "Geocache held hostage" or some such thing. The guy selling it was very nice and polite in email exchanges, but then the cache got here. The baby themed dvd that he said he would include along with the cache is actually a bootleg copy of that DVD. I honestly am thinking of reporting him for it. I only said I wanted that too just because I wanted to squeeze every last cent out of him that I could for it. The cache is here, with his log entry and the SD card he added with 4 pictures on it. What they are pictures of I don't have a clue....there aint no way I am sticking that in my computer to see what is on it. I have one of those picture frames that I'll try it with, but that takes walking upstairs and I am too lazy to do that now. Now my main beef with the transaction is the fact that he states he was sending it Priority Mail and chaged the $4.95 for it. It came Media Mail. The guy just pocketed probably 2 to 3 bucks on the shipping there. What happened to him not wanting to make a buck??? I know some of you think this was foolish to pay for it and it will encourage others to do it; but I do think this case was different. But the main reason I bought it for $2 plus shipping was because it really bugged me to think this guy wouldn't even send a logbook back to the cache owner. I dunno. Just ticked me off and wanted to do something about it I guess. Whatever the reason, I just wanted to set the recorded straight that even though this was a different case, the guy was still somewhat shady in his dealings. NOW, OFF TO LEAVE EBAY FEEDBACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Had to revive this thread just to show off the coin that The Saint sent me for this cointest. I was surprised at it and think it is a really neat little coin. Here he is alone and also in the clutches of Megatron, my latest TB that I am getting ready to send out. THANKS AGAIN to The Saint! Hope Gnummy has many long and fun adventures on his travels...

Oh! And CONGRATS on the new baby!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have both "A New Cacher" in blue version and the "Mackey Made It!" coin. Of the two, I like the A New Cacher coin best. I went on a search for one when we found out that we were going to have a boy. I bought one from someone on here from Canada that was a regular version, and when that was happening I saw the LE glitter version on eBay. Got into a bidding war and ended up paying WAY too much for it, but then it was sometheing special I wanted for my son. It is shaped like a baby bottle and on the back has the words "our family has grown by two feet". and has a frog and butterfly on it. To me the Mackey one is a little plain. But that is just my personal opinion. Don't get me wrong, they are a nice coin, but I guess I was looking for something a little more cartoonish. There are also blue or pink piggy banks out there that are cute too. I will warn you already that I did a search for that New Cacher coin very extensively and they are hard to find. And even harder to find someone willing to part with one. I had contacted the husband of the designer and neither he nor his wife had any blue ones left; he checked around for me and couldn't find any either. So they are going to be hard to come by. I would offer you the extra one I had, but my son had come 9 weeks early and so we spent a month in the NICU. He came out with no problems and is doing great, but there was one of his nurses there that really helped us out and was there for us through those first days there that were so scarey. Came to find out she was a cacher, so I gave her the extra one.

Done it once or twice, but never got the hang of it. SOmething to do with then taking the one file and opening it in google earth, or doing the route in google earth first...I can't remember. I usually just try to scout out the caches along the route using the geocaching.com maps. I follow along the way I will be traveling and as each screen refreshes the visible caches, I click on them and see if they are something I would want to do. Takes longer...much longer if you are going on a long trip, but I like the option of viewing which ones I want and passing on the ones that either don't look interesting or just not what I want to do.

Give it a little time to adjust, however the most annoying thing with using it in the Great White North is how the GPS starts saying, "ah, hey, you hoser. The cache is over there, eh?"

To Garmin: "what's that little hole up near the base of the antenna of the 60CSx for?"

Ha , yes, particularly annoying when only a handful of characters have been used in the name field, leaving half the screen blank anyway <rant> Ok here goes... I have contacted Garmin directly about my eTrex H asking why they only allow (6) characters for a Geocache name instead of the now (7) character cache names. Their response was "we don't currently have any plans to expand the number of character limitation of the cache name for the eTrex series, and we don't offer any download/hotfix/upgrade for this issue. We suggest you use additional software to convert the geocache name to a shorter version before transferring to your handheld." For such a big company having a widely recognized name in GPS technology, you'd think a quick upgrade wouldn't be too much to ask for! It's a terrible pain to first download the information to another piece of software just to shorten the name, as opposed to when I could have just clicked the "send to gps" link. By the way- for those that don't know, if you try to download two geocaches w/o shortening the name (ex: GC1234a and GC1234b) you'll get (1) copy of GC1234 which will then be overwritten by the second download's coordinates/info. Ugh! </rant> They all start with GC...why not just drop that.

I had the opposite problem with mine. Auto routing was on, so if the cache was 300 feet away from me, it would want me to get on a road, follow it up and turn around to get to the cache. Once I turned it to off road mode, I get the straight line and don't have that problem. could doing that in reverse work?

Just got a used 60CSx from the forums here and I can tell you, once you get it you will be happy with it.

So it will give it the ability to hold fast on a cache location? I have a 60CSx and haven't taken the time to mess with it. upgraded recently from the Legend HCx. Some will say that isn't an upgrade, some will say it is. I just use the term to mean I switched. lol. EDIT: oh wait...tri - axial...not sure if it is that or not...Gotta get out the manual.

Finally got out to put them all out today and now awaiting the geocoin!

Just did a side by side comparison with the two and again, the Legend had some trouble, but locked on after I held them both up side by side. Legend was held horizontal, 60 was held vertical. 60 never did lock on. Kinda disappointed. I guess the quad antenna will work better out in the field where it gets the wider view, but still...was expecting more out of it, I guess.

I was using an eTrex Legend HCx and got over 120 finds with it before I got a 60CSx. I was frustrated under the heavy tree cover when the Legend would send me walking back and forth and back and forth. So I got the 60. In the house, especially the basement, the 60 is worthless. But the Legend locks on. Even in the basement area where stuff never works. So, why? I thought the 60 was superior due to the quad antenna, it has worked great out in the field, I assumed it would out do the Legend totally. But apparently not so. Any ideas why?

While it might be the case in this example, there are many small towns that have a local newpaper or weekly entertainment rag that use newspaper boxes. We're not always dealing with the New York Times here and thus the owner of the newspaper boxes may be approachable and explicit permission granted. In my town there is a local daily paper, a weekly entertainment paper, and a daily paper put out by the University. All of them have small offices one could walk into during opening hours and ask for permission. One could even offer to submit an article on Geocaching to the paper to be published in the paper to coincide with the placement of the cache. A local geocacher that left the area had a series of four newpaper box caches that all had a simple puzzle. All of them said that "The cache is not at, but near the published coordinates". These came out just after I started caching and I figured out that they were probably in newpapers boxes so I went to do a brute force find on one "near" the one closest to my house. I figured, how many newspaper boxes could there be. It turned out that the published coordinates were smack dab in the middle of a womens dorm hall for the local University, probably not the best area for a man of my age to go sneaking about looking for a newspaper box. Once I did solve the puzzle it turned out that it was about 3 blocks away. A bit after I found it I noticed a string of DNFs and since I drove by it every day I stopped to check on it. In place of the rusty newspaper box where the cache was hidden was a freshly painted box. I often wondered after that if there was another freshly painted newspaper box somewhere in town with a hide-a-key stuck in it. what i was meaning was that as we look at TBs n caches as our property, muggles just see something we left behind. in their eyes that sorta means we release it from ownership

Guys take a step back a minute. As far as it being the original owner's property, no muggle is going to view it that way. They see something that someone else left somewhere. Second, I don't agree that we should pay ransom either; but look at the situation. The cache has been missing for 2 years or whatever. It isn't like this guy went out and stole a cache to sell. He is simply trying to recover his loss in dealing with it. Basically, he sold it for the cost of listing the item, packaging and shipping. Yes, maybe the decent thing to do was to send it to the owner, but again, we are looking at it from a muggle's prespective. And I will make sure that in the very least the log will be sent to the original owner, Blizzard.

I use the compass screen and never the map screen for caching - so I have never seen this. Could you have accidently "panned" the map a bit?? That seems plausible if it happens once or twice in the field, but should be able to tell if you check it a number of times in a row.

Never had that problem...an occassional hick-up every now and then, but nothing like it hanging up. Love my HCx. It is now currently the back up to my 60CSx. I was going to sell it, but it was such a good little GPS that I'll hang onto it for awhile yet.

Altoid tin, from appearances And looks sold as well.

And some are in urban settings where people don't have access to great expanses of green. Plus, these types of caches offer up a different requirement. Stealth and the challenge of find something that is hidden in plain sight gives a whole different spin on caching.

If you seldom record caches that you find, then what is the big deal? Are these groups standing guard over the caches so they are present at every find checking ids? If you just sign the log are you going back to check and see if they scribbled your name out? And how does that issue fit into the whole, "I have more smileys than you" thing? Especially since your rarely log your finds online and just sign the logbook. Sorry, but your post just doesn't make sense when you look at these two issues. Yeah it would be wrong to do this as a local group if they are listing caches on GC.com. If they are listing them privately, they I guess they could demand that. Personally, I think this is a trollish attempt to attack the whole premium membership thing. And really, there have been enough threads dealing with that and enough nonsense with it in just the year that I have been here. If it is true, then contact Groundspeak and speak to them about it. Other than that group deleting your online logs (which as I read it, you rarely do) I don't see where they can actually keep you from caching their caches.