natenrose

I had heard of geocaching but never gave it a thought, really, until a month or os ago, when it was on the Travel Channel. I live in a msall town int he middle of nowhere so I didn't think there would be any near here, but I decided to check anyway. Sure enough, there are tons and tons of geocaches here - one was in the cemetery next to our church, and I thought it was so cool that there was this thing that only a few people knew about. (Well, I guess "a few" is relative...) I went out that day and bought a little inexpensive GPSr and since then we have found 16. We have 5 or 6 DNFs, but I only logged one. The others were simply because we didn't have more than a minute or two to search an area, and that doesn't really count as a true DNF.

Download the GSAK program (free, just google it) and then you can download the waypoints to that. You can set your setting in GSAK and it will automatically format it for you. Then just send it over to your GPSr and there you go.

my magellan explorist 210 was $75 plus tax, on sale at meijer.

I have a magellan explorist 210. a lot of diehards think this model is junk, but i LOVE IT! I only have one DNF, and it's a nano that has been found recently so I think its me, not the GPSr. It has an 18 hour battery life and its very easy to upload your geocaches via GSAK. For my budget and part-time geocaching, this has worked out great. I got mine on sale for about $80 but regular price was $149.

I do it differently. I create bookmarks, then select which caches to download. Then I open them in GSAK and send them to my GPS. For me, this is easier than using pocket queries.

i guess i should add, since it seems like i may have misunderstood, that when i am following the arrow, it is on a map. I don't follow the compass part, because i can't figure it out. i know how to use a real compass, the one on my GPSr doesn't work the same so until I learnt o use it, I disregard it. So when i say i follow the arrow, i am following a map. my map has the arrow and shows me where to go, but also has, in light gray, a beeline to the site.

I've been asked once (we have not been cahcing long), and since i was tired and really didn't feeling like explaining it, I said I was looking for a ring i lost. Since then I have seen people in that area of the park with metal detectors, oops!

just one for our family. our kids range from 7 months to 7 years.

voted. i'm 27, the nate half is 32. (just voted for me tho.)

I am new too. I have a very inexpensive, bare-bones GPSr - a Magellan Explorist 210. What I do is download my bookmarks to my computer, then open them using GSAK. That program converts it to the right format automatically so I can plug in my GPSr and send the cache names and coords. right to it. Then I find the first one I want to go to on the map function, press GOTO, and follow the arrow. When I am within 1/2 mile I switch to the coords. view so I can get more accuracy, and when I am within 15-20 feet I quit looking at the GPS altogether. I learned that one the hard way - looking at the coordinates and not the ground, I ended up walking into some majorly rusty nasty barbed wire peeking out from the leaves, and got myself a couple nasty cuts. (Should have gotten a tetanus shot too, probably.) I do carry a notebook for any notes I might want to take about a certain cache, or if its a multi so I can write down the coordinates I find at each stage. I have tried using paper only and its just easier (for me) to do it mostly paperless. edited for a really silly typo

okay none of the stuff i said up there was accurate. this is how i did it. I put it all into bookmarks, then downloaded to .loc file. then i was stuck for an hour. I couldn't figure anything out. so i downloaded gsak and fiddled around with it. You can select your GPSr and then send the .loc to your device and it just magically converts them to what they should be! and its really just presto, there they are! its like david copperfield stuff! mdplayers, i tried to run a pocket query but that confused me so i made a cup of coffee and messed around with something else for awhile. I will have to come back and learn about all that. (I don't do help folders. I like to learn it myself with trial and error.) I guess my problem with PQ is I can't figure out the point... but like I said I will come back and mess around with it. oh, you do have to hook your unit to the computer (via USB) and put it in File Transfer Mode. there is probably some other stuff i am forgetting because I was totally just screwing around with it when i figured itout. i doubt this is helful but if you still don't have it figured out by tonight i will go back and do it step by step and tell you what it took. for now - its 70 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, we're going geocaching. okay, but where would one find geocache manager? it did not come with my gpsr and its not on the magellan software site...?

there isn't software for the 210 called Geocache Manager. Its called MapSend, and it is a geocache manager, but its not called that. (I know, cause I've been looking for it all morning.) Your 210 should have come with the software for MapSend. Once its installed, open it and click the second icon from the top (on the left.) This is where you will import items to your GPS. Of course you need to first download the files from the geocaching site. (If you don't have MapSend, you can download it on the magellan site, but I don't know if its free or not.) I can't personally attest if this works, because I just figured it out myself. (I bought my 210 just a couple days ago.) But, I am going to try it right now and I will update with whether it works or not.

The first thing I looked for was a nano that hadn't been found in almost two months. Duh! I have found a total of 4, and searched for a total of 6. Like the others, I go for larger caches, and since I have very young children (7 months, 20 months, 4, and 7) I go to places that require little bushwacking. Well-groomed cemeteries and parks are favorites so far. Its also good with the kids around because if its a busy area, we don't look too conspicuous poking around in bushes. You know how little kids are always running away and getting into places they don't belong. The only one that made feel stupid was one in a cemetery that was hidden in a very obvious place. I mean, WAY obvious. And it took us about 45 minutes to find it, even though we were literally standing right next to it. Anyway, the logs at the bottom of the page are VERY helpful. I have a little notebook where I write the number and title of the cache, as well as any clues I can glean from the log. For instance, if someone writes "It fell down on the ground," well then I know its supposed to be up high. I'm sure once we get better at this, I won't need so many notes. We like the ones that are just a little bit harder because its not all that fun to just spy something right off the bat. Good luck, it will get more fun once you start finding!

It doesn't seem like I'm doing this right... please bear with me! I just bought a Magellan Explorist 210 after seeing a show featuring geocaching. I read the manual but am still having trouble using its features... however, I have been able to find a few caches. I have been writing down cache info in a notebook and using the device like a compass sort of, watching the numbers change as I go. Is this the way to do it? Or can I somehow send the information to my device? thank you in advance for your help!! Rose in Michigan