rawkhopper

This is actually one of the biggest misnomers. Weather plays an almost negligible effect, and in fact the GPS signal frequency that is used was largely chosen because it wouldn't be affected by weather. See here: http://gpsinformation.net/gpsclouds.htm Except on the days that it does Have you never been out caching in heavy cloud cover only to just get enough satellites to get a somewhat decent fix? I don't know whether or not it is the biggest factor but I know it has a huge effect sometimes. I was near my house in the woods (where I normally get awesome reception) took 30 minutes to get a fix because the satellites kept dropping in and out.

Smallest I found was one of these Nanos Largest I found was stage one of a multi that was about 2ft cubed (each dimension was 2ft not 2 cubic ft) and second stage was 2 ammo cans.

Enough Goat Gravy?

What about 450 vs 62s which one do you guys like better?

Virtuals in DC are a bit of a unique situation. 1) It's very difficult to place physical caches in DC. Not impossible, but difficult to find available, permissionable land. 2) It's also difficult to maintain physical caches. If there's a place in this country where there are eyes on suspicious activity, DC is it. 3) By contrast it's generally easy to maintain a Virtual cache. For the most part you have to drop out of the game, and for the listing to become known as a couch potato cache, for it to be considered unmaintained and possibly archived. 4) DC gets an absolute ton of visitors, for whom Virtuals are just about the only game in town. 5) Almost by definition, any active Virtual has been in place for several years (as new ones haven't been allowed for quite some time). That's a lot of added time to rack up finds. As a result, those DC Virtuals have racked up thousands of finds in the 5-10 years they've been active and are going to get their fair share of Favorites votes by virtue of that volume. I'm in no way saying that they're not good caches or that the Favorites votes they've received don't reflect great experiences from the visitors. But in every case I've identified the totals are large in the aggregate but less than 5% of the visitors (and in many cases, well below 5%). The totals here seem driven by some quirks of how Virtuals work in a city with a lot of tourism. Hopefully they will follow through with the percentage of finds/favorite votes deal. That will help sort the good from the old and popular. Just because a lot of people visit don't make it good. So heres looking to the update for favs.

I believe the problem with DC is that mpost of it is Federal land, that would not allow the placement of a physical cache. I have a found a couple that made it to my favorite list, while all of the DC Virtusals did not. That may be the case but those virtuals have more votes than what I consider the top notch caches in my neck of the woods. I live outside DC in Virginia near Mount Vernon. The virtual there has more votes than any of the many caches in my 15 mile radius. So they are popular whether I care for them or not.

Be prepared to think out of the box. Most I have found have been within 15' which is fine. I have however found some up 40 feet off. Not sure why they were off so far. I never would have found one without the hint it was so misleading. Most of the time it can be chalked up to signal bounce or a weak signal, like on the side of a fairly steep hill or heavy canopy. Although I have found a couple where it was a perfectly clear day with light canopy and person after person complains of bad coords and the CO claims they are as good as they can get and use a respectable GPSr. So anyway I would at least think 20 feet with a high success rate on clear days.

We all know that the Waymarking site is almost unsued and not very popular, neither are virtual caches. Some want to see the Waymarking site improved and used my more cachers, some cachers want virtuals reinstated, but only if they add numbers to their geocaching stats. It is all about the numbers, remove the numbers, lose the support of the virtual cachers. Most waymarkers are PM's. We have to be to PM's to vote in the peer review and manage our waymark categorys. Of course you did not read it any place, and what you have read that has been posted by TPTB is extreamly vauge. Wonder why? Because they know that Waymarking and virtuals are not popular with geocachers. It is all about the numbers for most geocachers, if they can't get a smiley, it's not worth their time to log. I enjoy the flexibility of having virtuals at historical places but I am not a huge fan. I prefer an actual cache. Sheesh I even prefer webcams, bring those back! Anyway I do not think your assessment of virtuals is accurate. If you look in the DC area the most favorited caches are the virtuals by a long shot. Kind of bums me out. There are only a few actual caches that make it into the top list of favs in my area and some of them are simply there because they are old and not because they are anything special. Whether you or I like them and go bonkers for them or not they are very popular.

I used to drive from VA to FL each year. That is one very boring stretch of highway. Nothing to see but billboards. If had known about geocaching it could have made the trip enjoyable. Well if I ever do it again I know I will be doing some CAAR PQ,s.

Thanks for not having a knee-jerk reaction that ends up banning geocaching in the park! Nice to know some people are level-headed and try to do things the right way. I hope we as a whole respond in a responsible fashion.

Please do not just throw it in the trash. Not for the cache owners sake but for the land. If it goes missing then people will look harder and venture further and further into the land. If the cache owner goes and replaces it then you are back where you started. The correct action is contact the publisher/reviewer of the cache he can archive the cache and prevent future caches from being placed there.

It is Nerdy! Embrace your inner nerd! If you are comfortable with it then they will say "hey that cool guy does geocaching let's be like him, it must not be as nerdy as we thought!"

Not sure the answer to your specific question as I do not use .loc or mapsource but have you tried using gsak? I have Mapsource installed but never use it because GSAK does everything I could imagine. What is it that you are trying to accomplish, maybe we can find a temporary work around.

Yes

I earned a Florida souvenir but it hasn't shown up either. I emailed them and they said they were having trouble with the last batch they fired up. Hopefully they will get it worked out soon.

Have kids! My wife loves that I geocache with the kids on occasion and that it gets me to do a bit of excercise. She will go with me so long as the hike is not more than 3 miles round trip and we don't have to come back the same way we left but she mostly likes that I do it with my kids and when I am out of town for work.

I didn't get an email or a souvenir yet

Welcome back. Some like 'em some don't. I choose the ones I go to and sometimes I get the quickies, sometimes I go for puzzles, sometimes I go for hikes. I like variety.

Zipcode search should find the nearest caches to the center of the zipcode but not limited to that zipcode. If you did a 20 mile radius there would most assuredly be many zip codes included in the results. Does that answer your question or did I misunderstand? thanks. but i used to do a search on this zip code and there are LOTS of caches within it (from center)....the nearby zip results that it gave me are probably more like 13 miles away.... the local ones don't show up...? some that should show up within this radius: cabinetland, bark!bark!bark!, JYSC #1, VUJC, WallyWorld....just to name a few that i've found in the past... bonblu Oh sorry didn't understand. Just for kicks I did the same search and it came up with 4 results total. I did n't realize that. So I went to google and typed the same zip. And both maps center on the same area. I am guessing it is a problem with google maps. Not necessarily, it's not so much a google maps issue as is a geocoding issue. What is geocoding you may ask? Geocoding is basically a mechanism for resolve a feature, sometimes called a "place name" to a set of lat/long coordinates. That feature could be a zipcode, the name of a city, a specific address, or almost anything else. Many travel web sites allow you to search based on airport codes (i.e. LGA for La Guardia airport) or a city name (New York City). When you enter a zipcode into the box, the system has to use some data source to lookup that number to get a set of lat/long coordinates then will display geocaches within the specified radius from those coordinates. The thing is, there are a few different sources of data and if the data source is changed it might result in a different set of lat/long values than you may have seen previously. Awhile back I tried several different ways to search for caches in my area. I entered the zip code, just the city/state name, the city/state *and* zipcode, and on some other variation on a different form. I ended up with four different sets of center points for the search. Probably the best way to do a search for caches close to where you live is to set you home coordinates in your profile, then base your searches on your home coordinates. What you say may very well be true but the coordinates in his area are not coming up a little off. It is more like the zipcode is being read wrong. Every zipcode I tried near him came in the center of a zipcode down and to the right of the proper area. This was true on google.com but not true on a zipcode map that uses google maps. So my guess they got a glitch that is going on right now. If it were off by a little this is not bad but we are talking several zipcodes mapped completely wrong.

I was planning a cache similar with fishing line. I thought it would be cool to throw the cache over the branch of one tree and then throw it again over the branch of a nearby tree. The the vertical part is hidden against the tree and only the horizontal part would be visible but with backlighting it would be hard to see. My guess is that you would have to make sure there was some excess so that when the wind blew it would just slightly raise and lower the cache rather than snap the line. I may just try it right across a trail 10-15 feet up.

I love the stats of the game. As soon as I realized it was possible to keep track of them I started tweaking and tweaking to show what I wanted to see. I think it keeps the game more interesting. I don't cache often so you wouldn't know I like the numbers portion by looking at my stats but I did go for a single cache out of a ton surrounding me just because I want to fill that spot on my matrix . What was really interesting about the numbers of that cache is that it was a cache dedicated to another cachers milestone of a 1000 or something like that. And further more I happened to show up at the same time another cacher and it happened to be the owner. The owner was moving the cache to a different side of the stream so that people did not have to cross the stream in winter. I did not see him near the GZ so I assumed he was bird watching or something. When he left I found the spot that should have been the cache site. Then when I got back to log a DNF I noticed that the page had changed and he was there to move the cache! What are the odds of that happening! I went back the next day and grabbed the cache

Zipcode search should find the nearest caches to the center of the zipcode but not limited to that zipcode. If you did a 20 mile radius there would most assuredly be many zip codes included in the results. Does that answer your question or did I misunderstand? thanks. but i used to do a search on this zip code and there are LOTS of caches within it (from center)....the nearby zip results that it gave me are probably more like 13 miles away.... the local ones don't show up...? some that should show up within this radius: cabinetland, bark!bark!bark!, JYSC #1, VUJC, WallyWorld....just to name a few that i've found in the past... bonblu Oh sorry didn't understand. Just for kicks I did the same search and it came up with 4 results total. I did n't realize that. So I went to google and typed the same zip. And both maps center on the same area. I am guessing it is a problem with google maps. I would report the problem to google and search by GC number until it is fixed. Type a GCxxxx number for a cache near the area you are looking for.

Zipcode search should find the nearest caches to the center of the zipcode but not limited to that zipcode. If you did a 20 mile radius there would most assuredly be many zip codes included in the results. Does that answer your question or did I misunderstand? thanks. but i used to do a search on this zip code and there are LOTS of caches within it (from center)....the nearby zip results that it gave me are probably more like 13 miles away.... the local ones don't show up...? some that should show up within this radius: cabinetland, bark!bark!bark!, JYSC #1, VUJC, WallyWorld....just to name a few that i've found in the past... bonblu Oh sorry didn't understand. Just for kicks I did the same search and it came up with 4 results total. I did n't realize that. So I went to google and typed the same zip. And both maps center on the same area. I am guessing it is a problem with google maps.

Cache is a real word. Geo is not in debate. Dictionary.com says (kash) as the pronunciation. Although around here in VA I have heard geocatching

Zipcode search should find the nearest caches to the center of the zipcode but not limited to that zipcode. If you did a 20 mile radius there would most assuredly be many zip codes included in the results. Does that answer your question or did I misunderstand?