wildlifewriter

I use A registered version of cachemate: £8 An eTrex Vista with Metroguide Europe: £260 An iQue 3600 with CS7 & Cachemate & Fugawi & & Birdwatch &etc: £470 approx Premium membership of GC.com: £16 2 PCs and a UNIX server & broadband connection: £ 3200 approx A Renault Megane II DCi: £15000 approx Wet weather clothing for Ireland: £120 approx A divorce: £27000 and counting Total cost to go paperless: £46,074 (incl. VAT) so far... -Wlw.

Of course. You probably aren't aware of this, but TPTB have gone to the trouble of setting up a website specifically to cater for your interest. It's called Waymarking.com, and can be found HERE. -Wlw.

I didn't know he was a holiday cacher! <hawk, spit> No surprise, though - to quote Dryden: "All, all of a piece throughout." -Wlw.

Is it possible that the third para on this page might be relevant... ? -Wlw. (Edited for typo)

I have tried it, (as I've tried them all) and - as usual - there's good points and bad points. Pathaway's heart is in the right place. It is continuously developed and updated, and the authors listen to their customers. It works well on the Palm, has a clever but unorthodox user interface, and is well priced for what it is. There is a good selection of maps available for it - IF you live in Canada, France, or Germany. Some general Euro road mapping can be bought on CD, but I haven't sampled this. There is no UK Ordnance Survey mapping, as done by Fugawi or MM. Pathaway can be used to import and calibrate your own raster maps, if that's what you want. I think it beats Fugawi at this, particularly when using the results on the Palm itself - where Fugawi's PDA implementation is woeful. Imported map segments are quite large in terms of filesize, but this is really a PalmOS problem, rather than a fault with Pathaway. Sum-up: good if you make your own maps; not good if you want an out-of-the-box solution in UK. -Wlw.

Another outing for this daft scare story, which seems to appear in every GPS-related forum on a wearingly regular basis... Yes, it's that old fool Norman Bonnor again. Outgoing (and about time) President of the Royal Institute of Navigation, and - by a strange coincidence - a spokesman for, and ubiquitous advocate of, the Galileo project. This article is good for a little competition - see how many factual errors or misleading statements you can find in it. I've got nine, so far... -Wlw

In layman's terms: You have tried to install the wrong file. Plucker has a number of different components. Some of these are for installation on your desktop machine. Some are for use on the Palm. The file which goes on your Palm device has a filename which ends with ".prc" You should download the documentation from this page, and study it carefully. -Wlw.

You don't say which software tool you are using to extract and store the tracks. I'm a Garmin person myself, and it works fine for me when: (1) Tracks are dumped from GPS to PC, and saved in .GPX format. (2) GPX file opened directly in GE. Interestingly, this displays the "track" as a line, but not any points along it. Just the line. I'm pretty sure that the GPX file must show the correct attribute of a track, for this to work as you want it to... <time>2005-10-28T19:14:11Z</time> <bounds maxlat="54.215169" maxlon="-5.893478" minlat="54.192209" minlon="-5.911245"/> </metadata> <trk> <name>ACTIVE LOG</name> <trkseg> <trkpt lat="54.205663" lon="-5.893929"> <ele>8.789185</ele> <time>2005-09-20T10:53:00Z</time> </trkpt> <trkpt lat="54.205642" lon="-5.893950"> <ele>8.789185</ele> <time>2005-09-20T10:53:08Z</time> </trkpt> <trkpt lat="54.205513" lon="-5.894508"> <ele>6.866455</ele> <time>2005-09-20T10:53:27Z</time> </trkpt> <trkpt lat="54.205363" ... and so on. -Wlw.

Perhaps I didn't understand the original poster correctly, but I got the impression that people placing caches without permission WAS the subject of his discussion. It was certainly the subject of the lecture that I had to listen to, yesterday. -Wlw. [Edited to quote the quote]

The 'people' wouldn't agree with you. I ran into almost exactly the same situation as the OP, yesterday afternoon... I have permission to place caches in a nearby Regional Park. (This wasn't easy to secure, as there are three different agencies responsible for it.) During the original discussions, I gave the whole spiel about guidelines, and how Geocaching is a responsible and properly self-regulating hobby. There wasn't a problem. A problem appeared when a visiting cacher decided my choice of location was so suitable that he'd hide one of his own a few hundred metres away. Unfortunately, he didn't hide it very well and the park staff found it while cutting grass verges. Next thing, I'm asked to come and be spoken to by one of the park supervisors, who have suddenly decided that Geocaching isn't a responsible and well-regulated hobby after all. They don't understand the distinction between me and this irresponsible holiday cacher... They just think we're ALL irresponsible. I had to agree to take the offending box away with me (even though I didn't own it), and it took some fancy chat to persuade them to allow my own caches to remain there. I didn't tell them that they were being "irrational" as this would probably not have helped. -Wlw.

I've been approached on five occasions to adopt or act as maintainer, by people who have placed caches in Ireland but are not resident here. Unfortunately, my criteria for agreeing to this are a lot more stringent than Geocaching.com's guidelines... * GC.com prefer a statement from the placer that permission to hide was obtained - I need to see proof. * GC.com don't (usually) approve caches within 0.1 miles of an existing one - I won't maintain if it's within 1.5 kilometres of an existing one. * I won't maintain if the container is inadequate - and most holiday cache containers are far from adequate for conditions here. * GC.com don't (usually) approve caches in a SSI or ASSI - I won't accept one if it's in ANY designated conservation area. And... if all the above criteria are met but I'm feeling more than usually grumpy that day, I probably won't agree anyway. -Wlw.

Did you try selecting a different tone, to see if it's easier to hear? There's a choice of ten, and you can assign different tones to different features. -Wlw.

If you were to learn all about it, you might be as surprised at some of the assertions in this thread as I am... ... and it might cause some amusement down at the Ordnance Survey offices as well, were they to read it. -Wlw.

The highest resolution aerial images available on GE are at an amazing 1 inch-per-pixel - of this building, and the area surrounding it... See if you can figure out where and what it is... -Wlw.

That only happens when you (the owner) view the listing, because of the extra owner-specific fields further up the page. The rest of us see it correctly. (Nice excuse for a cache advert though - I'll add it to my forthcoming list of "Ways To Advertise Your Own Cache on the Forums and Get Away With It.") -Wlw.

The fact of the matter is that the "basemap" is exactly that - a basic representation of the main road system as it exists. They are not accurate to the last 50m, sometimes not within 150m. If you look carefully at most of the roads at high zoom, you'll see that they are composed of straight-line sections. The reason for all of this is quite simple: it's not possible to fit a highly-detailed road map into the tiny ROM space of an eTrex. Here is a comparison: first, the Yeovil area from a Garmin basemap... And this is the same (approximate) area, when mapped with Garmin's Metroguide v7 product... There are two things that you can do: 1) If the basemap discrepancy is really annoying you, try going into "Map Setup" on the eTrex and select the "Lock on Roads" option. (Don't forget to turn it off again when geocaching. 2) Purchase (rather expensive) additional mapping for your unit, such as the product referred to above. Again, because of memory constraints you won't be able to fit all European mapping onto the eTrex at one time, but it will hold a substantial local area in GB - and is better than the basemap for many reasons. Hth, -Wlw.

By all means, if you wish. However, my beef is not with those who review such caches - it's with those people who place them in the first place. -Wlw.

I already have a list of "Lame Holiday Caches in Ireland" but it was withdrawn from share, after peer pressure on another forum. Apparently people felt that it wasn't fair to single out lame holiday caches, just because they were holiday caches and, er... lame. There's some new HCs appearing in Ireland recently (after a welcome absence) so I'm thinking of reinstating the bookmark list, now... -Wlw.

I'm glad that HH brought this up, because I thought that the "publish" option for my lists was enabled. (And it was!) After reading this thread, I checked back and they had been disenabled* again. -Wlw (* - It's a word if I say it is.)

Here's how this works.... The link back to a bookmark list from a cache page is controlled by the list owner. Go into a list in "edit" mode, and there's an option... "Make this list public (show on bookmarked listings)" We now have two different concepts: "sharing" the list, and "making it public". When the changes first came out, this "public" option was enabled by default. Now it isn't, so each list owner will have to go and check it if they want that facility to work. Hope that makes sense. -Wlw.

Well done, Dave... ... see you back in Ireland soon. -Wlw

No. It has nothing to do with that. -Wlw.

Well done there, Rubber Chicken, on not quite getting to 50 finds. Personally, I'm delighted to see thoughtful and intelligent youngsters like yourself who have such consideration for us old people. You obviously grasped that we have very poor eyesight, and needed to use the giant typeface to get your message seen. Leaving out all those stupid full stops and commas makes the whole thing simpler, and far less cluttered. Good job - I'd do the same myself, if I wasn't worried that my posts might be, well... unintelligible. -Wlw [Edited for sarcasm]

That is correct. There is ONE thing you might do, though... The Garmin GPS V is an excellent unit, but it's been around for a while. During that period, several firmware revisions have been brought out - and the most recent ones directly affect the use of WAAS/EGNOS The current firmware revsion is 2.50. I suggest that you check which version your unit has (read the manual, p56) and upgrade it if necessary. -Wlw.

Golem: Don't worry too much about promoting your caches. Although this is supposed never to happen, you'll find that certain of the more experienced members of the UK forum do it all the time - often with the flimsiest excuse, and sometimes with none at all. To help, I'll shortly be posting a newcomers' guide to the subject, with the topic title: "Advertising Your Own Cache In The Forum - and how to get away with it" Watch out for this. -Wlw.