duncanhoyle

This one was taken inside a Royal Observer Corp bunker that was in excellent condition. It's a shame that most have been trashed. Unfortunately the cache (http://coord.info/GCZNTW) has now been archived This one is from a bus shelter. Usually fairly boring but this one's certainly not - the Unst Bus Shelter (http://coord.info/GC1TK5D). Everything inside was drenched except the cache - nice and dry in a large ammo can

Some more advanced search functionality would be really useful. A friend is in to completing challenge caches and wanted to find caches with specified colours in the titles. She doesn't use GSAK or any other offline db and maintaining such a large DB for the whole of Germany, UK and parts of Holland where she regularly caches would be unfeasible. The only solution is to use the same qualifying caches as everyone else. It would be so much easier to be able to search on key words. I recently got interested in challenge caches and thought I'd search for all the mysteries with 'Challenge' in the title in the UK. Looks like I can't and can't create such a PQ.

I regularly look at bookmarks (both my own and other people's) and it would be really useful to be able to sort the caches in bookmarks by distance from my home. Seems like an obvious feature to add!

Two caches at the same coordinates... http://coord.info/GC2HJYV http://coord.info/GC2HK2Q The mystery is in a tunnel below the traditional which contains instructions on how to find the entrance. It was fun but not dark enough!

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately we were a little short of time so we didn't get much done except a few close to a friend's house in Hardwick and the Saffron Walden Wherigo. On the Wherigo we were accompanied by a friend who works in the town and he enjoyed the history tour of places that he hadn't been to.

I'll be in Cambridge for a day soon so I'm looking for suggestions for caches round there, possibly towards Stanstead. Not really after anything urban, a pleasant circular walk in the country would be good preferably with woods rather than just fields. Puzzles and multis are fine in addition to trads. I have a car to get to the start. Thanks Duncan

My first dedicated GPS was an Etrex30 with a faulty electronic compass. It was so frustrating and unreliable that I regularly resorted to switching it off and using the satellite based compass (i.e. the one that required you to move, at least I think that's what it did). After that I bought a GPSMAP 62s and the compass is reliable. I use it all the time. When I'm looking for a cache I generally get to the approximate location, stop to look, refer to the gps for a direction in which it thinks I should walk, walk that way and check that the distance decreases. This works well with the current, accurate compass in pretty much all circumstances which I've encountered. Most of my caching is in the countryside and often under trees where gps reception isn't great. If I'm relying on a gps based compass then presumably if neither the first reading used for the compass and the second reading for the compass are both inaccurate then the compass can't be trusted at all. I get to the approx. location and look at the compass. Walk in that direction. Now it tells me to walk in the other direction because the signals that it used for the compass were inaccurate. Now it tells me to walk in the other direction because those new signals were wrong... Or am I missing something in how they work? One non-caching instance when I wouldn't have wanted to walk around to get a decent compass direction was in the mountains last year when we were close to white-out conditions and I knew that there some steep drops in the area. Of course, I also had a hand held compass and map but I find the gps much easier these days. Having used both there's no way that I would now revert to a gps without an electronic compass

If you make a cache premium only you can access an audit which gives you a breakdown of caching names and the number of times that they've looked at the page. I only use it for my puzzles. So far one cacher has looked at one of them over 140 times and still he hasn't logged it or asked me for any help. The audit is only accessible by you (and possibly reviewers)

Just one example of something that I did last weekend - for all the caches in my database (placed there with a combination of PQs and GSAK API calls) I filtered for those within 30 miles, that hadn't been found in over 12 months, that weren't archived, that had a d/t of at least 2/2. I then updated these with the API to make sure that my data was up-to-date. I then exported them to a GPX file that I uploaded to my GPS using Windows Explorer. Another example - when I was trying to fill my grid I wrote a macro which gave me just those caches that would help me complete it. Not that it's complete I've modified the macro so that it can give me those caches that will help me complete the grid for each cache type. These can then be exported as a GPX file. Also, when I was trying to complete my grid, I had another macro which would set a user flag field on caches that would help me. When I exported caches for an area to MemoryMap format I modified the export so that those caches were given a red icon so that they stood out more on the map. Lots more examples...

GSAK is fantastic and well worth the registration fee. I'd hate to go back to caching without it. For me the most useful facility is to write (and run) macros which let me export unfound caches a certain distance from specified centre points in various formats. I also regularly search the database for unfound caches to export. I've recently discovered the 'Get geocaches' menu which lets you, amongst other things, query the GS website and download caches within 50km of a given centre point.

I don't think I've posted any photos yet as I've not had any that fitted the themes. Maybe themeless every month would help but I don't mind if the winner decides if they want a theme or not the next month. One thing that I find gets in the way of participating in the photos thread or even reading through it all is that people regularly reply with quoted text that includes the images. Often I've had to scroll through several repeats of the same images just to get on the next one. Perhaps it would be workable to set up one message thread which had the entries without people replying to them and another thread with the images that people can reply to as currently happens now.

Thanks. I'll look into it

I'd be afraid to use that in the woods in case the beam burnt the trees down! Talking of burning, how about this one with 4100 lumens. The video shows it setting light to plastic within 5 seconds

Thanks Not exactly what I meant but useful to know and I have it working now. Originally I was after a way to have images and text on a single scrollable page, but multiple pages with single image and text on each page might be best

I'm in the early stages of creating a Wherigo (in Urwigo) that will take the user on a walk through several parks. During the walk they'll enter zones that have certain trees in them and when they do a guide to that tree will displayed in their item inventory. The guide will then be accessible to them for the rest of the cartridge. I need each guide to have multiple images and several areas of text. I could break each guide down into multiple items (pages) that could have text and one image each but is there an alternative way to do this? An item for each page in each guide will make for a lot of items and managing the cartridge could get unwieldly. Thanks for any suggestions Duncan

The recently published Haggis Highway series in Scotland has 1082 (http://www.geocaching.com/bookmarks/view.aspx?guid=4514ad76-9816-4d4e-8f74-6078176ecf2f)

At a recent mega in the UK there was a discussion panel and Jeremy (who apparently was on holiday close by) was on it. When asked about nanos I believe his response was that it had been discussed and he couldn't understand why it hadn't been implemented already. The only issu he saw was woking with 3rd party vendors to ensure that their hardware/software handled it.

I have an Earthcache based on the beach at Tynemouth, Northumberland (GC2MMWH). Despite the fact that thousands of visitors go on to the beach every week/month/year(?), I was required to obtain permission from North Tyneside Council as "land manager" and also Natural England, as the coastline from Berwick upon Tweed to Tynemouth (ie the whole of Northumberland) is designated as a SSSI. The cache does not require anyone to remove or interefere with anything physical, or go into an area where the "general public" doesn't already have access to. To be fair, this Earthcache was set up during a period when the UK didn't have an Earthcache reviewer and someone "sitting in Seattle" probably didn't appreciate the local situation. I should also point out that both North Tyneside Council and Natural England were both very co-operative and helpful, and were probably as puzzled as I was! That part about needing permission from Natural England due to SSSI designation is strange because I was recently told by our reviewer that 'As for SSSI lands, NE only administer the designation. They are not the landowners. It is politic to inform them of the cache placement, but permission must come from the land owner/manager '. We do have our own Earthcache reviewer now though so perhaps things have changed

I volunteer with the local wildlife trust and it's one of the yearly tasks to pull it out, but not at all the reserves. The trust (and many others) are starting to use controlled grazing on several of their reserves and at those locations we tend to control it. Unfortunately those reserves (hills or sand dunes) tend to be unsuitable for some of the agricultural control methods so it has to pulled out by hand by regular volunteer groups. It's taken several years but a couple of locations are showing a distinct lack of ragwort this year but it spread so easily I think we'll be going back regularly for several years. For the last couple of years we've been using these tool and they work really well. They've also experimented with spraying citronella oil but it wasn't successful. We could be seeing more of it because of the weather this year or possibly because a lot of councils are making countryside staff redundant. I think it's poisonous to most mammals (including us) but most will avoid eating it whilst it's still growing.

Presumably you could look for some dry ground that happens to have a crack in the top surface of the soil and push your cache container into the crack. As long as you don't enlarge the crack by inserting the cache then you haven't dug or broken ground. If the soil becomes wet and the crack closes up who's to know if the initial cache broke the rules or not?

Pub details are on the cache page at http://coord.info/GC3TA2T The monthly NE event usually changes venue every month with someone different organising it. This is the first visit to this pub so I can't say for sure what it'll be like but the pub website (http://www.brewersfayre.co.uk/brewersfayre/our-pubs/newcastle/dunelm-ridge.html) says it has stuff for kids. The event is usually nothing more than several of the locals getting together in a pub for a chat about caches, caching, latest adventures, future plans or anything else either cache or non-cache related. I don't remember seeing any kids at any of these evening events and I've been to most of them since we started last year. Of course, that's no reason not to take them. Attendence varies and has been as high as 20 I think. If you want to chat with some of the locals before turning up several of us post on our local forum at http://www.negeocaching.co.uk/index.cgi Duncan

I'm in the UK too, and it's also possible to get burns of common hogweed, although it's not that usual and possibly depends on a person's sensitivity to it. I have a couple of small scars on my arm after moving piles of grass that contained it. I know of another person who suffered similarly. It hurts like hell!

I know it would be a little more bulky, but could you not just fasten a gps to your wrist?

When considering making an underwater cache a friend once said that a waterproof container is only waterproof as long as the last finder closes it correctly! I never got round to making the cache, but if I did I'd make sure that the log was made from a waterproof notebook

NEXT UP: BRING BACK VIRTUALS - MY OWN PERSONAL UNIQUE VIEW NOT HELD BY ANYBODY ELSE EVER. Ohh... Ohh... Ohh!!! Can we follow up that one with a "Why isn't there a nano category" thread? Strangely enough, that question was asked to the panel at the UK mega q/a session last weekend and Jeremey said that he didn't know why there wasn't one and that he thought there should be. The only issue would be working with all the 3rd party application developpers to make them aware of it so that their software would either work with the new type or default to something like unknown. The issue I've always had with the term 'muggle' is that if used in the Harry Potter sense it implies (to me) a person without a knowledge of geocaching or without the technological ability, and therefore unable to take part in caching. This isn't the case though, because a 'muggle' can be made aware of caching and all they then need do is use a phone,gps or even just a map to search. This is a skill that can be learnt by anybody and does not rely on latent ability. I don't use the term