nericksx

Last November I bought the Garmin 24k Topo West map (download from the site) for my GPS 62s. I attempted to download it via Basecamp, but never could find a way to make Basecamp "see" my purchase. It kept saying "no unlocked maps" I finally looked at my email receipt again and followed the download instructions which included the Communicator plug-in. I emailed customer support because I couldn't believe I had to install the map this way. The support rep insisted that the Communicator plug-in was the only way to get my map because it "installs directly to the GPS or SD card". I never did get it working before my trip to snow camp in Lassen NP. It downloaded for 36 hours, then got hung up trying to "activate" my map. We actually delayed our trip by 5 hours to see if I could get this working, and never did. Fast forward to today. I decide that since I'm just hanging out, and it's going to be hiking season soon, I'll work on this again. I break out IE 11 (?!) and download the stupid Communicator plug in. I plug in my GPS and it takes about 2 hours for the map to install on to the SD Card. This being a 4gb map, I bought a big ol 64gb card for my GPS. Well, it downloads (took FOREVER), but the file names don't seem right: D1532010A.gma D1532010A (disk image file) D1532010A.unl Sure enough, the map isn't detected my my GPS in the map setup. I thought it was because I was trying to use a big 64gb card that was formatted exFAT32, so I snagged the 16gb card from my phone and formatted it FAT32 and tried again - same result. I've downloaded this 5 or 6 times and it's never worked. Right now I'm just furious because I spent $130 on this map that I can't use. If anyone has any insight, that would be great. Thanks!

OhhHHHhhhh! I wondered what the intended suggestion was there, thank you for clarifying. Also a good idea!

I used to leave a little zip bag with one large marble (a "shooter") and 5-7 small marbles, with a little card with our family's sig on it saying that sometimes we lose our marbles finding caches. I thought it was super cool and clever until I hauled a handful of them on a hiking trip. Marbles are HEAVY!

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! I didn't know you could buy tracking numbers, I might do that. I'm fairly handy/creative so there are lots of handmade items I've thought about leaving, but I really like somehow hearing from the person who picked it up. <reference to an unapproved, not trackable on Geocaching.com item removed by moderator> Hmmm... I'll have to ponder further!

I unknowingly committed a major faux pas yesterday. I started a thread about pathtags using the term generically, not realizing that it is a brand name (the way everyone uses Kleenex for "facial tissues")and got my post deleted. (The moderator prolly thought I was a shill for the company or something ). However, I really am just out for some general research: 1) What is the generic name for trackable sig items that you get to keep if you find one? 2) Are there any Groundspeak authorized dealers that make something like p-tags? 3) Do people log them if they find them? Are they worth the money to have made up? This is my favorite trade item to find, hands down, and since I like trading nice SWAG I am thinking about doing this type of thing too. Any suggestions/tips/advice? Thanks in advance!

A CO who hogs a whole darn area with crappy containers. This weekend we were excited to see a nice concentration of caches in a forest area. The first few finds were the same crummy ineffective container with a damp log and a rusted lid, so we passed up that road and did a run on a nearby jeep trail - also by the same CO. It was O.K. Just O.K. I count 45 caches in a 6 square mile area by this one CO. So the whole area is saturated (hogged, IMHO) by so-so, micros-in-the-forest*, leaky, rusty containers. Kind of a shame - so much potential there. They were posted as smalls, and while I can see not labeling chewing tobacco cans and power bait jars as micros, AFAIC they're micros since all that there is room for is a log. 45 micros in the forest! Augh!

Hi! I've actually been at this for 5 years now. I've been active on the forums off and on, but it's been "off" for the last 2 years. I thought I'd get back on and see what the latest chatter is. It's nice to see the same names I've been seeing for 5 years. So... Hi, again!

Thank you everyone, for your kind words and thoughts.

I have a Garmin GPSMAP 62s and a Motorola Droid smartphone. They both use microSD cards, so one trick I've done on the road (quick, before we get too into the boonies and I loose signal) is to take the SD card out of my GPS and pop it in my phone, then run and download a PQ for the area, copy the file to the SD card, then plug the card back into my GPS. My phone will work as a GPS, but it's only A-GPS so it only works where there is signal. With this little trick, I just have to get to a patch of signal for about 10 minutes in order to grab caches to plug into my GPS. Happy (paperless) caching!

Patton/Marwell/A-Team...you nailed it. The PQ was originally constructed by ensuring all of Mt. Hood Nat'l Forest was on the screen, then clicking the link to make a PQ out of it. It turned out it was a radius of 61 miles. Then I set it to only return 500 trads/multis, and small/reg/large. As I have now learned, it returned 500 caches starting from the center of the search area (a point somewhere south of Mt. Hood) and radiating out until it hit 500. No way did it reach a 61 mile radius, but it included all the caches in all the areas I was planning to frequent, so I didn't think that hard about it. I ran my PQ on 6/20 and loaded it into my tablet and GPS. Apparently between 6/20 and today, quite a few new caches must have been placed closer to the center of my search circle, and I just happened to have been caching this weekend on the very edge (unknowingly) of that search. I just checked the PQ, and the "missing" caches are indeed outside of what I can now see is a smaller circle, but less than a half mile from where I was in person this weekend. It was kind of a perfect storm really, to have this happen. There just happened to have been enough new caches placed in 3 weeks to shrink my 500 cache circle, and I just happened to have found a couple that were inside the circle 3 weeks ago, but outside now. I'm really thankful to all of you to helped me think this out. I hate not understand how something I rely on (even just for fun) works. I just extended the return count to 1000 to widen the circle, and all is well.

No none of the caches are archived. To answer StarBrand's question: the missing caches are in the same area (about a 2 mile stretch along a river) but it is a variety of terrains & difficulty, all small or regular, a variety of COs. The caches are well within the radius of the search, as caches farther away from the center show up. Again, I understand the system pulling 500 caches randomly if there are 600 in the area. Although, I didn't think of new caches being placed in the area in the last month changing the returned data set (per A-Team and JPatton). So far, that is the explanation that makes the most sense. I would love it if a Lackey developer would weigh in and let us know how the PQ algorithm works. I'm not complaining at ALL, I just want to understand the system so I can use it more effectively (and not feel like I'm going crazy!). Thanks for the input everyone!

Nope, because the missing caches are in my downloaded PQ file from 6/20, but not showing in the preview now. Plus they were all placed 2011 or earlier - and no, they're not all archived. Good thought, tho.

Nope, no difference. The only attributes I specified was a 61 mile radius, traditional & multis only, and small/reg/large size only. No terrain or difficulty rating restriction. I just tinkered with the PQ to see if I could tweak it to make the "missing" caches show up. The only change that would force the missing ones to show was to increase the result output from 500 to 1000. Then the missing caches showed up. Now I understand that if you try to pull a 500 result PQ from an area with 1000 caches, the system is going to pick and choose for you. I'm just surprised that the system-pick would change, if you haven't re-run the PQ.

Last Thursday my granny died. She lived in another state and she had been deteriorating for a very long time. The day before she died, we knew it would be just hours or maybe 1 day. So when I got the news by text from my mom early Thursday morning, it was sad, but not a surprise. Everyone in my family went ahead and went to work, including my mom, because there wasn't really anything else to do. We agreed that after she got off work at noon, I would come over and keep her company. When I got over there she was making phone calls and my sister was over. After awhile the phone calls were done and my sister had to leave for an appointment. When all was quite my mom looked at me and said, "I know this is going to sound weird, I mean, tell me if this is really weird, but I want to go do a Geo. I just gotta get out of the house. I kinda want to do one in a cemetery." So, I whipped out my PQ of nearby caches and found one at a cemetery nearby where most of the pioneer families of our area were buried. We drove over and found the cache in no time flat, then wandered around looking at the stones and marveling and the huge and beautiful oak tree in the middle of the cemetery. We sat on the little wooden benches and talked about... stuff. We tried to find couple more in the area after than and came up DNF, so we went and had dinner together. When I called to check on Mom the next day, she said she was doing ok, then bad, then ok again - as you would expect. She said that she had things to do to keep herself occupied, but that most likely she was going to go back to that cemetery because it was the only place she was able to find some peace in three days. When we go out of state for Granny's funeral next weekend, I'm taking my GPS with a fresh PQ - because you never know when you're just going to need an excuse to get out of the house and find a peaceful place to be. tl;dr: Geocaching in a peaceful place distracted my grieving mom for awhile and made her feel better.

Around on June 20th I ran my Mt Hood PQ and loaded it into my offline mapping app for use on my Android tablet. I've been working off this same revision of the PQ for 3 trips to the mountain now, including this past weekend. Today on my lunch hour I decided to log my caches from this weekend and since I didn't have my GPS with me, I pulled up my Mt. Hood PQ on the website to refresh my memory. I was really confused when I found that most of the caches we did or talked about doing where not on the PQ list. Dumbfounded, I grabbed my tablet and pulled the GC numbers from the 6/20 PQ. So the question is.... why are my downloaded PQ results from 6/20 different from the results that show on the PQ preview? I haven't changed the PQ parameters at all. This makes me a little nervous because after I pull a PQ and load it into my tablet or GPS, when I'm in the woods I'm pretty confident that if there isn't a cache listed on my GPS or tablet, there is no cache there. Now I'm wondering how many potential caches I've been missing because my PQ isn't what I thought it was.

I wonder what ever happened to Disenchanted's (now Okiebryan) class, six years ago? I was reading through the thread and heartily agreed with people who questioned the wisdom of teaching something that you're a newbie at yourself. Now he has over 1500 finds!!! Wow! I wonder what he would tell his 33-finds, 6-years-younger self, now that he's an old pro edit: I see that NeecesandNephews was editing the same time that I was posting and I see that Okiebryan really has become a pillar in the geocaching community. Good on him! Now I REALLY wonder what he would advise his younger, newbie self!

I have to say that I also enjoy a playground cache, but then I'm a mom with two elementary school-aged kids. We have discovered lots of playgrounds that we didn't know about this way. I am not a fan of hides near dumpsters near bottle/can return kiosks in parking lots on busy street corners In general, we don't urban caches and rarely do suburban caches. We like an nice ammo can at the end of a 3-mile hike in the woods. Thankfully, where I live there are a lot of woods.

Well no, not the same thing at all. VHS, DVD and Blu-Ray are entirely different formats that require entirely different technology and hardware to use. A more appropriate analogy would be having a Blu-Ray player in the living room, then after a couple years buying a second Blu-Ray for your bedroom and finding out that in order to use it, you have to re-purchase all your movies. That would be the most asinine thing you'd ever heard of! It's the exact same technology! You bought the movies fair and square! So what do you do? Go on a bit torrent and pirate the movies. Actually Jon, thank you for your analogy because I think I was able to clarify my issue even better. People didn't hesitate to go ahead and upgrade from VHS TO DVD and re-buy the movies; at least they could watch the movies on any player from then on out. Go ahead and buy a player for every room! Toss out old players and upgrade to newer ones with better features! Garmin is discouraging people from upgrading to newer models. If you have to re-buy all the maps, why spend the money?

As pointed out already, this is not Garmin but a NAVTEQ licensing issue here in the states. I understand your frustration. When I got my last car, they refused to transfer the extended warranty from the old car to the new one. They even refused to transfer the oil, gas, windshield fluid, air and oil filter, trans fluid, anti-freeze and the new shocks I had just purchased 6 months before. Wrong, wrong wrong! Baloo, I see the point you are trying to make, but I think the metaphor is misguided. You are referencing expendable commodities, (time, labor, oil, gas, etc) which of course should not be "bottomless." However, I'm not lamenting over the fact that I can't buy a map once and get endless free updates for life. I'm disgruntled by the fact that I can't reuse a piece of software that I legally obtained and, considering the price, ought to be able use and re-use on legally obtained devices from that manufacturer. Again, see my references to other software licensing arrangements. They could even go with an iTunes model where you activate some number of devices and can de-activate devices you no longer own. OR, they could charge less for the maps. If they were only $10 I could see charging for each device, but at $100 a user should have much greater licensing rights. Basically, you need to add $100 to the cost of any Garmin product, and this arrangement discourages users from owning more than one device. Of course this is just an opinion, but I think $100 is a lot for single-device-license and I wish I understood the logic behind it. Are they really going to loose money letting people put maps they buy on multiple GPSrs? From what I've gathered here, no. People just go open-source, for the most part. Would they MAKE money by loosening the licensing? I think so. I think people would be more inclined to own multiple devices if the maps weren't so spendy. Heck, I think people shy away from buying a GPS in the first place because of the "price" of the maps. You're either go to pay with money, or you're going to pay with your time trying to muck around in open-source-land. I know that is what kept me away from the units for so long. It wasn't until there was a bundled map deal that I finally purchased a GPSr.

Neither do those who are trying to assist you. If your display is not close to the screen shot on the mapset's webpage there may be an issue with the GPSr's settings. As you feel we are not allowed to ask for further information, nor expect what you say is accurate, I can not see why anyone should spend further time on this. Enjoy the Garmin mapset. Well, that was just the thing. I didn't ask for help. I know where to find free maps, I know how to make my own maps. If I want help with making and using free maps, I will post a specific question with all the relevant info in the correct thread. I appreciate you are trying to help, but I didn't ask for any. The topic of this thread is Garmin map licensing.

Can you be specific, as exact mapset and location (coordinages)? If it is the mapset I think you are refering to 'developed on a Garmin Oregon' is from the mapset's webpage which states 'uses custom type styles developed on an Oregon 300 with shaded relief set to 'do not show''. I just looked at that mapset in MapSource and I see contours at 1000' intervals when zoomed out, then those at 200', and the contours at 40' when zoomed-in to .2 miles or more. I do not see any contour lines at 500' or 500' intervals, but would not expect to as 500/40 is 12.5. This is such an odd line of questioning. I did not have both GPSes side by side to make detailed and specific comparisons when I noted my opinion above. What I noticed is that the free one has different data. The free one's elevation lines are different. The addresses look weird. It's also yellow for some reason. I took a guess that the lines were set every 500'. I didn't take a magnifying glass to the thing. Bottom line: I think it's ugly. That's ok. I can think it's ugly. I can even think it's ugly for reasons that turn out to be incorrect. I didn't really expect someone to come along and double-check my work, since I was expressing an opinion. Let me rephrase: The free map doesn't look like the Garmin map. I'm not sure what all is different and I don't care to spend a bunch of time figuring it out. It's just.... weird. I like the Garmin map better. I wish I didn't have to own two copies for two devices.

GPSFileDepot's page for Oregon lists 8 topos. Which one? Also, what do you mean "developed on a Garmin Oregon"? How do you know how it was developed? Because it says it right in the description: http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/maps/view/424/ What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?

Without knowing which mapset you are refering to, I would say you are zoomed way out and seeing the index contours (500'). As you zoom-in the intermediate contours at 100' should display. At around the 800 +- display zoom level the 20' contours should display - assuming you have the display level set to normal. Also remember that: 1. what can be created for Garmin GPSrs was reverse engineered and learned by trial and error. 2. The same feature may display differently on different models (including Garmin's own mapsets). and 3. Different users are interested in including and displaying features differently (what makes a mapset for one user may break it for another user). The map I got is a topo for Oregon, developed on a Garmin Oregon. Even zoomed in, the topo lines are only at 500'. It's ok, because like I said, the kids are using this device and I still have my 62s with really good maps. I agree about the big screen, which is why I have a printed map as well as a tablet using Backcountry Navigator. Of course, using a tablet geocaching is just silly, but it's great in the car and at basecamp. Having good in-device maps for a GPS (despite the screen size) is a pretty big deal when you're caching along a hiking trail as we most often do. The kids like to know how much more elevation change to the next cache, so they can decide how much they need to whine about it

Thanks for the reccomendation on the rechargables. I use Eneloops in our Wii controllers, but have been using Fujifilms from a defunct digital camera after I realized alkalines don't last long. I'm flying a 62s which is also supposed to be good on battery life. I think it helps to set the setting to NiMh in the Settings. I forgot to do that the first time and left it set to alkaline.

Thanks! I couldn't believe my luck. There it was, the last thing left in a bin in a ziplock bag with the manual, software, USB cable, car charger and windshield mount. All the tag said was that it had been owned for 6 years, but nothing wrong. $300 when it was new. I think people at the sale just didn't realize what it was, all tossed into a ziplock bag and all. I think the owners returned it because they used it like 3 times and decided $300 was a lot for a gadget they rarely used. I was super duper jazzed because now we have a 2nd GPS that the kids can start learning to use. On the topic of maps.... The open source map I downloaded is not topo, which I prefer. The topo map from GPS File Depot is topo, but only puts elevation lines every 500ft and puts address ranges on every block (cluttered). The topos from Garmin are definitely more attractive. Like I said before, for as expensive as the Garmin maps are its ridiculous that license is device specific. Thats one of the reasons I cached for so long with a smartphone. Add $100 to the price of any GPS for maps. I made gorgeous atlases for my smartphone for free. The reasons I finally went with a GPS were for battery life and durability. (Although I'm finding that 2 AA last me one weekend. Not so great.)