GorpForBrains

Yeah. You can preview a PQ, and open them in another tab. Do you need them in one GPX file? You can either use GSAK to do it, or just edit it by hand if you're not intimidated by XML. I have a GPX parser application I wrote which parses the GPX file and produces an Excel spreadsheet that's my geocaching "note sheet". Then my GPS uses .Loc files. The waypoints are easy to get manually, but I use the pocket queries to generate the GPX files I need. Again, I guess I'll just wait till tomorrow, grab the gpx, produce the spreadsheet with my parser, and print before I leave the house.

Yep. Create another premium account. 10/day. I don't want to regularly produce 10 a day. I'm not that hardcore of a cacher... I just want to get some more just for today.... sigh. I guess I'll be downloading at the last minute tomorrow morning.

I have a trip scheduled for tomorrow and forgot to run the queries the other day when I built them. Well today, I need to run them, but I'm out of queries. If I started running them the other day I would have been able to do some and then do the rest today, but silly me, I didn't. BTW, the reason why there's so many different queries is that it's a lot of short routes with 20-30 caches along the route from A to B, B to C, C to D, etc. I couldn't figure out a better way to do it without making a bunch of little routes. Also as I said in my topic, I accidentally has some different queries not related to this trip that ran which consumed the rest of my 5. I leave on my trip early in the morning tomorrow. I guess I could at the last minute run them early in the morning and then sync them, but... sigh I was hoping to not have to wait till the last minute. Is there any way you can get an extra set of queries to run on a given day?

I gotta admit, as a newbie, I as really annoyed looking at logs and seeing all these acronyms. Honestly, when I log either a find or a did not find, either way I think to myself... "if I had a cache, I'd want to know about their experience". So when I post, I always write at least a simple couple of sentences (or more) telling them about my experience. I think it's more meaningful to the cache owner. They take time and energy to ensure that cache stays in working order so that I, the cacher, can enjoy finding it. Leaving a meaningful log is kinda the best "thanks" you can give someone.

We're currently at 8 finds. 3 micro, 1 small, 4 regular. So yeah our "geo-sense" isn't quite honed yet and pretty much every cache we've found has been hidden in a way that's surprised us. Some of the caches we've been stumped by have been "regular" sized caches with a 1.5 difficulty though which is what had me worried I was doing something wrong with the GPS. I didn't expect it to be 100% right on every time of course. I just wanted to know if I was doing things right which it sounds like I have been. Thanks for all the tips, I wasn't sure how often I needed to calibrate my compass for example.

Hi Groundspeak community! First time poster and new geocacher. My wife and I are looking for a little advice on using our Garmin eTrex Vista HCx. We're noobie geoacachers and have found 8 caches on 3 hunting trips with a bunch of DNF's including 2 locations which we've taken multiple trips to try to find. We're having a lot of fun, but want to improve our usage of our new GPS unit which we cache with. Sometimes we have no problem at all finding our cache locations (then it's just the fun of finding the cache) with only about a 6 foot differential on position to cache. Sometimes the GPS bounces around as much as 50 feet in random crazy directions. I've read a bunch of the manual, but hey I'm a tech geek and don't want to read through every page of the manual to find the 1 or 2 lines of text which might help me with this problem (if there's even that level of detail in the little manual). We have the US West National Parks and North West TOPO 24K so we got good, detailed maps. We sync directly to the GPS from the search pages on geocaching.com. We've tried calibrating the compass. We've tried turning off / on the GPS when we're "near the cache" to make sure the satellite get a good positon on us. Any advice works well.