Munin

One thought is that there were only four people who logged "Up,Up,Up is the Way" between the time you were there in November and the time rovers3 found the fish TB in June. (3 finds, 1 maintenance note.) Might be worth a quick email to those cachers to see if one of them is the TB's owner or remembers finding it in yet another cache prior to "Up,Up,...".

I did a little writeup last year in a thread called Vague Locations In Towns Are Hard To Find! that showed the type of prep work I often do when heading to an unfamiliar area. Occasionally I enjoy playing "lab rat in a maze", scurrying along loopy little residential roads and bumping into cul-de-sacs trying to find my way to the "cheese", but most of the time I'd rather spend 10-15 minutes mousing around the web from the comfort of home if it might save me 20+ minutes of driving around feeling lost and frustrated.

Another factor in the size of the 'accuracy circle' is the accuracy of the underlying map data - the lower the accuracy of the map, the larger the size of the 'accuracy circle', even when you have a good position fix. One way to think of this is that you might have good satellite reception and an estimated position that's accurate within +/- 5 meters, but if the locations of the roads shown on the map are only accurate to +/- 30 meters, then you still don't know for sure where you are relative to the real road beyond +/- 35 meters. Even if your positional accuracy improved to something fantastic like +/- 1 meter, the roads on the map wouldn't become more accurate, so the 'accuracy circle' wouldn't shrink very much. If you've got at least one supplemental map loaded on the GPSr (City Select, USA Topo, whatever) then you can see the effects of the maps by toggling between the basemap and the supplemental map - you can watch the 'accuracy circle' grow bigger on the basemap and smaller on the supplemental map, even though your positional accuracy is remaining constant.

Just a shot in the dark based on a GameShadow forum thread where someone was getting the same error message (although not from any GPS-related software): According to the followup in the GameShadow thread, updating Windows Script worked for that person - might be worth trying to see if it helps with your MapCreate problem. Good luck!

You can't overlay the Topo and City Select maps to see them simultaneously - you have to toggle between them. ("Toggle" isn't quite the right word - the maps are sort of stacked on top of each other, with the built-in basemap on the bottom, Topo above that, and City Select on top. A few button presses will let you hide the City Select map, at which point the Topo map becomes visible.) For offroading caches, I'll use City Select to navigate to the start of the 4wd area, then hide City Select and use the Topo map to navigate the rest of the way. Also take a look through the forums for topics on GPSr mounts, like this recent thread. I can vouch from personal experience that the beanbag-style mounts don't cut it once you get onto badly washboarded and similar rough surfaces. As far as GPSrs go, I'm using a 76CS. I think geobc is right on the money about the benefits of a color screen for viewing topo maps. Just to give you a rough idea of memory requirements, the 115MB built into the 76CS is just enough to store both City Select and US Topo maps for all of New England (MA, CT, RI, NH, and ME). That's serious overkill given how easy it is to download different map combinations - the 60CS would have suited me fine and dandy as far as map storage goes, but I found I actually preferred the way the larger 76 fit my hand.

For hand-making a custom stamp, here' s a couple of sites with instructions and tips: How to Make a Rubber Stamp Ruthann's Soft-Block Carving Sissy-n-CR sell stencils on their online store.

The amount of storage needed for a given area can vary greatly. For City Select it depends on how dense the road network is. For US Topo it depends on the feature density (lots of hills/mountains == lots of contour lines == more storage). But like briansnat mentioned, the topo maps for an area use a lot less space than the street maps. Just to give you a feel for things, here's a couple of examples of how much you could store if you were in the New York City area (figured I'd go with that since you logged a couple of virts there). If you filled the 64MB card with City Select maps, you could cover an area like the following - the pinkish areas show a selection of maps that would come in just under 64MB total: If instead you filled the card with US Topo maps you could cover a much wider area, although you wouldn't have any detailed street info: If you bought both City Select and US Topo, you could also load both sets of maps onto the GPSr, and switch between them depending on whether you were driving or hiking - that's actually what I do. A combination of full streets and topos around the NYC area that fits in 64MB might look like this: Basically if you compare that to the first image (which was City Select without US Topo), you'll see that I've taken off coverage for the tip of Long Island and some of the CT coastline, and reduced the coverage west of NYC a bit. Since the topo maps take up less space than the street maps, you can ditch a relatively small amount of street map coverage and use the savings to bring in a fairly large amount of topo coverage. You can play lots of games to trade off space usage between street and topo maps. Maybe you only care about topos for the Catskills, so you select a couple of those topo maps but don't bother with topos for the rest of the area - that'd leave more space to use for street maps. Or maybe you're planning a caching vacation up to Lake George, so you could download a different set of maps that had streets and topos running up I-87 but leave out Long Island and northern Jersey. I don't have City Navigator, so I'm not sure how the coverage on that goes. My understanding is that the current version of Navigator (ver 7) uses significantly bigger map segments than City Select uses, which might limit the ability to play trade-off games. Maybe someone else can provide some examples of what you can do with 64MB and City Navigator?

While the geocache mode isn't listed on the main 60CSx description page, if you follow the Manuals link on that page you can download a copy of the Owner's Manual (it's a PDF document). If you read through that, you'll see the section about the geocaching-specific waypoint list on pgs 20-21, and the geocache setup screen on pg 72. (You'll also find the games that McKryton mentioned starting on pg 87.)

FWIW, those rechargeable Duracell 2500 mAh batteries that I was testing in my 76CS the other day ended up running for 26 hours straight before the GPSr shut off. That's with backlight/compass/tracklog off, and using live satellites rather than simulation mode. Looks like these are "keepers". Yellow ants bring up some reasonable points - a cacher who only swaps batteries half a dozen times a year might find disposable alkalines more convenient/practical, especially if the GPSr is the only device they have that uses batteries. Yes, yes - in the long run the rechargeables should be much cheaper, but if you're not switching batteries very often then "the long run" might involve years before even reaching the break-even point because of the higher initial costs of going rechargeable. I paid something like $18 for my Energizer recharger with four 2500 mAh AA batteries. I could walk into Target and buy a 10-pack of Duracell AAs for $6.49. For Yellow ants, it sounds like that 10-pack might easily last them a year, so it'd might take nearly 3 years before they hit the break-even point. Sure, after that point they'd start seeing the savings, but it's a fair bit of time to wait. (And I'd definitely have to agree that batteries are one of the least expensive aspects of caching - heck, I normally spend more on swag than I do on batteries, and as for gas ... well, let's just say I'm trying real hard not to think about gas. ) Just so you know, Yellow ants, the cost of recharging NiMH batteries is almost negligable. Rather than tossing around some random number that I might grab from some random website (a typical claim is 1/2 cent per recharge), I'll do some real-world calculations. The AC adapter for my charger says it uses 13W. A typical recharge session for me after I've gone caching is around 2-3 hours. Let's be generous though and assume it'll take 6 hours. That's 13W for 6 hours, or 78 Watt-hours. The power company charges $0.1266 per kiloWatt-hour according to my latest bill, so the total cost of the recharging session is $0.0099 - let's round it up to one penny. (That's actually the cost for recharging four AAs, but of course my 76CS only uses two AAs.) As you can see, recharging my NiMH batteries is a fraction of the cost compared to buying new alkalines. For people who go through batteries on a regular basis (heavy GPSr use, and/or using other battery-powered devices like FRS radios, flashlights, etc), using rechargeables can pay off pretty quickly.

I just came across af895's parallel topic opened this morning over in the Geocaching.com Web Site section - seems to be all set now.

I use Garmin's U.S. Topo quite often while caching - I tend to favor woodland areas over urban spots. It's pretty decent, just keeping in mind that it's based on 1:100K maps, so it won't contain every trail or pond that you might find on a typical higher-resolution paper 1:24K USGS topo map. (At least in New England, Garmin's US Topo often shows fire/maintenance roads, but usually not singletrack trails.) Also be aware that the maps are only as accurate as the USGS topo data, and in some areas this info can be years or decades old. Not a big deal for mountains and lakes (they mostly tend to stay put ), but you might see newer roads in City Navigator that aren't shown in US Topo. US Topo is very useful for hiking, mountain biking, etc - 1:100K is plenty good for visualizing terrain. If you go to Garmin's US Topo page and click the MapSource Map Viewer "West" link, you'll be able to pan and zoom around their topos for the western US and get a feel for what they provide. (Note that even though there's four separate view links, US Topo isn't separated into four separate products - you get coverage for the entire U.S., and just download whichever areas you're interested in to the GPSr. A 76CSx should have enough space to easily store both street and topo maps for all of Washington, plus a considerable swath of the neighboring states. ) Garmin does also sell 1:24K maps covering various National Parks and National Forests, but these aren't places where caches are normally placed so they probably wouldn't be particularly useful for geocaching purposes. You might consider them if you and your wife regularly go hiking in National Parks/Forests and want more detailed maps for those areas. The US Topo 24K maps are sold in three separate products, covering Western, Central, and Eastern US. The one that'd be most relevant for your area would be US Topo 24K National Parks, West - info and another map viewer are available on that page. But like I said, this would primarily be of interest only for non-caching activities. (Also note that the 1:100K US Topo maps would already give you coverage of these areas, just with less detail.)

PQ results are emailed to you - that's how you receive the 500 caches in GPX format with all the fancy trimmings. There's no place where you can directly download the PQ results in GPX format. Just select a day for your PQ to run on and you'll soon receive your cache info. (They're batch-processed continuously on a machine dedicated to PQs - usually the results come through pretty quickly.)

I've been using Energizer 2500 mAh AA rechargeables in my Garmin 76CS for almost a year now, and they've been working well. Do remember to charge them up before heading out - NiMH batteries lose 3-5% of their charge each day even when not in use, so topping them off the night before is a good idea. (Or you can get a rapid-charger like Miragee mentioned. Those will "only" boost the batteries to about 85% in 15 minutes - it uses a slower charging rate for the last 15% - but as long as you pick up a rapid-charger that can use the 12V outlet in your cachemobile you can get that 85% charge in the time it takes to drive from one cache to the next.) Like Dude/Sweet, I carry spares with me - a second set of rechargeables, and some Energizer e2 lithiums in case I have a mental lapse and discover that I forgot to top off the rechargeables. (I don't have a rapid-charger, so it can take several hours for me to recharge the batteries if they're very low - unlike Miragee, I can't just pop 'em in for a quickie fix between caches unless I'm driving a looooong way. ) I went with lithiums for backups because I was doing some nighttime winter caching, and lithiums aren't really bothered by sub-freezing temperatures. I also picked up some Duracell 2500 mAh rechargeables a couple of days ago to play with - just running my first GPSr test on them now, but preliminary results look promising (took 5 hours before the GPSr dropped to 75%, and it's still showing 75% 2 hours later).

If you can find a local store that carries both models, try holding them and see whether one fits your hand better than the other. Some people find the 76 is too large for their hands, others (like me ) find it quite comfortable to hold. Since you mention gloved operation, bring your gloves along and do a touchy-feely test with them on. My thought on card size is to not sweat it too much - you can buy a bigger card for either model later on if you find you need/want wider map coverage. Just for some price points, The GPS Store has a 128MB microSD card for $24.95, or a 512MB microSD card for $64.95. So if you really preferred the 60CSx, $30 will bring its storage up to par with the 76CSx.

Have you tried taking it all the way outdoors - i.e., some place where it has a clearer view of the sky? If it's sitting on a window sill, the house will be blocking signals from about half the sky. Neighboring houses or a dense stand of nearby trees can further reduce the view of the sky by blocking satellites that are closer to the horizon. You might have better luck if you can sit the GPSr out in the driveway or on an uncovered porch, something along those lines where there's fewer obstructions.

Another example might be Shaker (Shady) Glen, Woburn - less complex in some ways (2 choices per stage) but possibly longer than what you're contemplating (up to 9 stages including the final). It was a very fun cache - even if you guessed wrong at the various stages, the only "penalty" was that you ended up seeing even more of a rather steep-sided but quite pleasant little bit of conservation land. (For anyone who enjoys hiking, that's like punishing a kid by giving them ice cream. ) It was set up so that all wrong choices would sooner or later lead you to coords of stages you'd already visited - the only combination that didn't eventually loop back on itself was the one that brought you to the final. Since it loops around rather than dead-ending, I thought of it as being similar to one of those old "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. Overall length varied, of course. If you're like me and ended up taking the longest possible route, then probably 2.5 to 3 miles total hiking. Might be half that far for someone who lucked out and guessed the shortest route. Total time that people have spent on the cache has varied between 1h 10m for someone who got extremely lucky and found the final early, up to 6 hours for someone who visited most of the stages - probably about 3 hours as an overall average. (So far I'm the second-slowest at 5 hrs and visiting every single stage - if I were a lab rat in a maze, I'd probably die of starvation. ) Things that I liked: always something definite to find at each location (either more coordinates or the cache), it was all in one area (kept you focused on hunting the cache, rather than hunting for a parking spot), and every place you went was an enjoyable (if occasionally strenuous) hike.

For me, I'd have to go with the epic Middlesex Canal Cache series (which starts with Stage One, followed by 10 more stages plus a related "side trip" cache). This series runs along the remnants of 27 mile canal that linked Boston with what is now Lowell, and played an important role in the development of the region during the early-mid 1800s. The person who set up the series included information sheets in caches along the way that described various aspects of the canal's history, construction, economic and social impact, and some of the key people involved - it was very well done.

If you didn't come across Wikipedia's Topics in cryptography page during your searching, you might find some useful links under the 'Classical ciphers' section. I found their Vigenère page useful when tackling a cache based around that cipher. As the person who created the thread, you can close it using the Options pulldown at the top of the page. (No moderator interaction needed.)

Some of the traditional things I look for with woodland caches include "unnatural piles of XYZ" (where XYZ could be sticks, logs, rocks), hollow logs, cavities in trees, hollow stumps, crevices in rock outcrops, and natural hollows at the base of boulders or fallen trees. For openings in trees/rocks/boulders, keep in mind that there may be additional camo like leaves or sticks obscuring the container. A penlight/mini-Maglite can be useful when peeking inside some of those spots, and gentle probing with a stick is sometimes a good thing to try before shoving your arm up to the elbow inside of a log that might turn out to be some furry critter's living room. I'll also keep an eye out for things that stand out in some way from their surroundings - a gnarled/twisted/lightning-blasted tree, a solitary oak in a stand of pines, or a multi-trunked tree. In largely uniform forests, oddities like these stand out more, and some hiders will use this to help focus your search on a particular spot. Like marmetion mentioned, don't get over-focused on the ground - you might be amazed at what someone can conceal in the fork of a tree trunk with the aid of a handful of leaves, pine needles, or a well-placed piece of bark. And a couple dozen yards of green rope can make even a 5-gallon bucket vanish into the pleasantly-scented embrace of a pine's branches.

Some of us type real slooooowwwwww. Couple of thoughts off the top of my head: If you'll be using the GPSr in places where you'll go more than a day without electricity - extended camping/canoeing/hunting trips - then the rechargeable battery on the Rino might be a liability. If you'll be doing mostly day trips where you return home afterwards, not such a big deal. (Either way, consider getting the 12V cigarette lighter adapter to use in your car - it won't recharge the batteries, but it'll avoid using them while you're driving to/from your destination.) The 60CSx uses AAs, so you can bring spares along and swap them on longer trips. Or if you forget to bring fresh batteries for a 60CSx, you can stop in at pretty much any convenience store and pick up a pack of Duracells. If you forget to recharge the Rino, it's "game over". (Realistically, you just need to remember to hook the Rino into the charger when you get back home at night, and it'll be ready to rock'n'roll the next morning.) 60CSx uses a microSD, so you can buy a honking big card and fill it with maps for a huge area. The Rino uses built-in (non-expandable) memory, but that 56MB will actually cover a pretty decent area. (You could store both detailed roads and 1:100K topos for about 90% of Washington on the Rino 530. And it only takes about 5-10 minutes to download a different set of maps if you're traveling/caching outside your regular area.) A 60CSx with a 512MB microSD card would hold topos and detailed roads for a considerable chunk of the Pacific Northwest (heck, probably all of it ), so that might have appeal if you travel all over the place. (The stock 64MB card that comes with the 60CSx would provide slightly better coverage than the Rino 530 - call it 95% of Washington if you wanted both roads and topos.) The 60CSx uses the SiRF III chipset - in plain English, that means it'll generally hold a lock better in areas with poor reception (urban canyons, dense tree cover, etc). It'll even hold a lock inside many buildings. For either unit, detailed road maps and topo maps are additional purchases - just something to keep in mind for budgeting purposes. The basemap built into these units is rather rudimentary - only major highways and routes, no side streets. If you cache in areas you're not terribly familiar with, the detailed road maps can be really handy. If you offroad, the 1:100K topo maps might be of some use - they're definitely not as good as 1:24K USGS topo maps, but roughly on par with the DeLorme Gazetteer maps. Using the Rino's GMRS radio to talk to anyone else requires a license from the FCC - I believe the cost is currently around $75-80 for a 5-year license. (Someone feel free to correct me if I've got that price wrong.) Again, just something to keep in mind for budgeting if that's a feature you're planning to use. (I believe simply using the position-sharing feature to send your location to other Rinos does not require a license - Garmin says they obtained a waiver for the position-sharing function.) NOAA radio on the Rino might be useful if you offroad and don't have a CB+NOAA radio in the Jeep already. Possibly also handy for multi-day backpacking or canoeing trips to see if bad weather's on its way, just keeping in mind the whole "rechargeable battery vs electical outlet availability" thing.

30 minutes seems waaaaay short - even if you had the compass enabled and backlight on high I'd expect you to get more runtime than this. (As a test, I powered mine up a while ago and turned on full backlight and compass. It took 35 minutes to drop to the 50% point, and another 35 minutes to drop to 25%. That's using 2500 mAh rechargeables in a 76CS, which has the same guts as your 60CS.) My first thought might be to double-check that the non-functioning batteries are installed the right way. Ummm, not that I've ever made that mistake or anything. (*cough* *cough*) It...ummmm...happened to a friend of mine. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket! I might next check that you've got the GPSr set properly for the type of batteries that you're using - hit Menu Menu Setup System and check the Battery Type setting. Alkaline for non-rechargeables, NiMH for rechargeables. If the setting is wrong, the GPSr may miscompute the battery life remaining and shut down prematurely. Next idea is to make sure the backlight is off - if you look at the little icons along the top of the display you should not see one that looks like a lightbulb. If you do, just briefly press the Power button to bring up the backlight setting, and then press it another one or two more times to turn the backlight off. The backlight is a major battery drain, so use it sparingly. If the compass is on, there'll be an icon at the top that looks, well, kinda like a compass. (Okay, maybe more like an eyeball - but it's supposed to be a compass. ) You can toggle it on and off by pressing and holding the Page button. Leaving the compass running isn't quite as bad as the backlight, but it still has a noticeable effect on battery life. (For the compass, just remember to calibrate it whenever you switch batteries, then turn it off and toggle it on only when you need it - it doesn't have to be running continuously to function properly.) The 20 hour lifespan is based on no backlight, no compass, no WAAS, and enabling 'battery saver' mode (which drastically reduces the rate at which it scans the satellites - generally not a good idea for geocaching). If you've got a multimeter in your toolbox, test the voltage on the batteries and see if they're low. Or as BlueDeuce and Team JSAM suggested, stick them in something else - a flashlight can work well if you know how bright it ought to look when running on good batteries. If you're using brand-new rechargeables, they usually take a few charge/discharge cycles before they start taking a full charge, so for NiMH don't get too concerned until you've run them through a few cycles. Regardless of whether you got alkalines or NiMH rechargeables, don't set your hopes too high if they're steeply-discounted off-brand/no-name brands. Sometimes there's a very good reason why a box of 100 "UberCell Incredible Mega-Maximum Batteries" is selling for $1.50.

Just hitting 'enter' worked fine for me w/Firefox and Mozilla - I didn't need to click the Search button.

Sometimes the closest road isn't the best approach. Let me toss out a theory based on clicking around some online info and see how it flies... Most of the online map links make it look like the cache is near the end of Countryman Rd. Based on the Google satellite maps, I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you were trying to come in from this direction when you encountered the gate and farmland - in the sat view that area looks like it's been cultivated. However, looking at the Geocaching.com Maps link on the cache page I notice there's a railroad shown passing near the cache. Hmmmm... And looking at the Google Maps for that location and selecting hybrid mode, there cache sure looks to be close to some sort of slash running WSW to ENE (consistent with a railroad), and near the south edge of a pond (possibly consistent with the "Erin's Picnic Spot" cache name). But the resolution is too poor to get too much confidence from this. Now I don't happen to have any Candian Topo maps sitting around my house, but hopping over to Garmin's site I used the preview mode with their Topo Canada, and with a fair bit of panning and zooming I ended up here: This also suggests that there is (or rather was) a railroad running through the area, roughly along the lines of what the GC.com map shows. And it hugs Drag Lake's southern shore pretty closely, which is consistent with the slash on the Google Map satellite view of the cache location, and again could be consistent with the "picnic spot" name. Since the railroad is marked as abandoned on the topo map, is it possible that it's been converted over to a hiking and/or biking path? Flipping back to the regular Google Map road view and panning around, it looks like the railroad might cross Reavie Ln to the east and Douglas Rd to the west (both off of Crookston Rd / 38). Perhaps there's a trailhead and parking at either/both of these locations where one might access the railroad/path/whatever-it-is-nowadays to get to the cache without the need to cross any farmland. Anyways, just something to consider.

Leaving material like religious tracts is a topic that comes up regularly, and almost always ends in a thread lockdown. To say that the topic is full of angst is like saying the ocean is mildly salty. I might suggest opening a separate thread if this really needs to be hashed through again, rather than risk derailing the current (generally positive) thread. Better yet, just use the search option to dig up some of the previous discussions, read through, and see if there's any new viewpoint worth bringing up - the deceased equine has been flagellated pretty thoroughly. So, back to happy land. Me, I've mostly been leaving caching-themed things lately - GC logo patches, pins, compasses, magnets, GC logo coasters, CacheSwag buttons and coasters, stuff like that. Over the winter I left a few Geocacher U "Caching Through The Snow" ornaments. These all seem to be pretty popular with subsequent cachers. The pins and buttons are particularly handy when I'm caching on business trips, since they're easy to pack/carry and they fit in almost any size container. I occasionally make forays into more child-oriented swag (yo-yos, colored pencils, crayons, die-cast cars and planes), since ...ummm...well... okay, I sometimes actually trade for rather childish things myself. Call it nostalgia, but one of my treasured finds was a Hasbro Cootie bug with a complete set of legs and antennae. I've also happily traded for silly putty, marbles, superballs, koosh animals, and pretty stones. (Being an adult 24x7 is highly overrated. )

See if this article helps at all.