Darwin473

Short answer no, long answer kind of but you still need to do a few steps. So (as far as I am aware, please correct me if I'm wrong) you'll still need to go through the first few steps of creating a cache listing, but the main body where you have your description, information, backstory, data for other caches in the series and so on - that can all be copied and pasted. If you're creating a power trail of near-identical caches for the number chasers, then that's about as streamlined as you can get. If you had something particularly ambitious (such as several hundred caches) then you may want to email HQ and see if they can help out with some streamlining. They'll probably say no, but there's a chance they might say yes.

Wow, I can honestly say it would never have occurred to me to use pop rivets! A good example of not thinking outside the box just because I didn't stop to think about it. One of my earlier experiences with a TB was with one which had the specific mission of heading west - and promptly was taken east! One of my TB's was dropped into a state with the log "taken to this state where it wanted to go" but there was nothing in the description about wanting to go to any specific states. The cacher may have had it confused with a different TB. For hosting a file, you could try Google Docs (though I'd personally set up a new gmail account for it - but that's just me), or DropBox. Google Docs has built in "share this document" functionality but I've never done it myself. Drop Box is meant for synchronizing files between different devices but also has the option to host a file. Both are at no cost, no matter how many people download it - though I suspect that this would be a very niche demand.

"Needs maintenance." Or at least that's what I should get... Edit: huh, I got "Difficult climb required". Is it talking about what caches I should be looking for, or me personally?

Oh wow, that looks like a pretty random spot! I wonder if it was just dumped there, or if it was in the middle of a project, broke down and deemed not worth repairing?

Optionally, if you skip over to Google Maps, zoom right in to where you are and touch the screen for a moment it'll come up with a "dropped pin" menu. (Zooming in isn't a requirement, it just makes it faster to be accurate because your fingertip is covering 30 feet instead of half a mile on the map) From there you save it and give it a name, go back to your preferred caching app and happily hunt knowing you have the location of the carpark / trailhead etc marked. Note that Google Maps isn't the best at giving directions along terrain (it'll try and guide you to a road or known footpath), but at least you'll know which is the right direction if you get turned around. A hiking app with downloaded topographical maps may be a better option if you do a lot of back-woods caching where there may be little to no data signal. I believe some apps can log as you walk, so you can backtrack along a known path you've already covered. This may be a good thing or a bad thing - I know I tend to go in "the hard way" and then find the wide, thorn-free path after I've found GZ! As a side tip, when I do this I have a naming system so I know which saved pins are important and which ones are naff. Something simple like having temporary ones start with a "z" so they are at the end of the list and you can batch delete them later. Or AAA so they are first on the list so you can easily find them when your battery is getting low.

As a six plus foot weirdo, it's rare that I get challenged. But my default response is honesty, starting with a cheerful "have you heard of geocaching?"

You take that back, I'm exceptionally high ended!

I was impressed this morning to get an email that one of my TB's has just been picked up by a fourth person! I dropped it when I first released it, it's had three others pick it up and drop it off and now a fourth player has picked it up. Much excitement! It's even received a few photos from the people who've moved it so far. Now, how to get my other ones to perform so well?

That's so fantastic! It's brilliant you were able to get it over the line (and then some), and props to all the people that pledged. Do you have a rough guesstimate on build time?

Brilliant! Your caches are old enough to drive and vote in most countries, and almost old enough to drink in the US. Nice!

We don't talk about the wastelands - by which I mean the east coast...

If you want to make one coin: arrange for how the coin will be made. Buy a normal trackable (or a nice one if you want to keep it). With the coin you are getting made - have the company put the code from the trackable and "Log at geocaching.com" on the coin. You now have a coin that you can put out and will have a tracking code on it. If you want to make your own design, and have it available to give as gifts or sell then you can go to the page msrubble linked. Keep in mind that your design must be approved by Groundspeak and you will need to order 50 coins.

My sample size (about 20 TB) is too small to generate a pattern; but my modus operandi is to use my TB to visit a few caches, add some photos and then release - either here in Darwin or somewhere else in Australia if I get the chance to travel. My most-travelled TB is LEGO Plate, which I took with me to the south end of the country, was picked up by one cacher and they've had it with them ever since. Caurrently doing a counter-clockwise lap of Australia, so I assume that cacher is a retired person or on an extended holiday. Interestingly, I only have one TB so far which I've marked as missing. I also dropped this one off down at the south end of the country at the end of 2020, it moved one jump to the left and then promptly vanished. I asked the CO if they could check their cache for it on their next maintenance run, and they confirmed it wasn't there. On the plus side, it was a proxy and I'm gearing up to re-release that one soon (I still have two more originals to do their initial release). I have two other TB's that I dropped off on the same trip, which have not moved since I dropped them. One hasn't been touched because nobody else has logged that cache since I visited, the other had one pick up and drop, into a Premium cache (which I can't see) and seems to have sat there since. I can't see how many people have visited that cache since it was dropped in there ten months ago, but it had a Hotwheels car as a hitch hiker, so I assume that one has gone MIA as well. Of the ones that I've dropped here in Darwin, six are chilling in their respective caches, another five or so are in the hands of casual cachers (log a find once a month or less). Our TB movements here are hampered by the lack of tourists, due to that little global pandemic thingy. That's something I'm looking forward to reading! There are so many variables, it's hard to pin down what can help a TB last and what is a bad idea. So much of the fates of TB's is down to just plain luck!

Another interesting read, thank you for taking the time to prepare and share this. I hadn't heard about the "live long enough to land in Germany" phenomena. Though I had anecdotally encountered it, in looking through prior logs for TB's that I've come across I had noted that many of the ones that came to Darwin had come from Germany. I would have thought the opposite to be true - more TB drops in the US rather than Europe, simply due to the language barrier. If I found a random box with trinkets by accident and couldn't read what was written on them, I might take one home to try and work out what it was - and then possibly find out and be unable to return it to the original location. Another reason to have "instructions to finders" on cache containers.

I had to go and look it up to double check, but I'd recently seen Kayfabe TB show up after being missing for ten years and a few days. I thought it might have been yours, but that's owned by a deleted account. Good to know that some turn up after a decade - but that's some long odds! Your data is very educational. I've got a few proxies out (I only send the proxies and keep the originals at home), and I've had my first get "officially" be recognised as lost and moved from the last cache it was in to Unknown Location. Not sure that I'll have the patience to wait the full three years before I send out a replacement, but for me half the fun is in making the replacements anyway.

This is brilliant, I love your reports. It's good to see hard data with a large sample set. I wonder how much the data would be affected by re-release of proxies after specific criteria are met (such as TB not getting a log after a year)? Depending on how the data was tabulated, I'd imagine it'd either be more of the same, just more data sets or a saw-tooth pattern, with each re-release causing a spike followed by another loss curve. It'd be interesting to have hard numbers on attrition rate for real TB losses (shiny and new being kept) vs proxies (people deliberately discarding them for not being real)?

It's discrimination I tells ya!

That's great! Hopefully postage doesn't deter people too much, but opening it up to more people should help. I know these Kickstarter projects can all be a bit hit and miss - fingers crossed you reach your targets!

Close. My opinion is that people are lazier and take less pride, so they get one set of coords and call it done. Rather than getting several sets of data on different days and averaging them. That would be a bigger contributor to "off" coords on new caches to my mind. I believe (and could be horribly wrong) that the sensor chips in phones and GPS units are basically the same, where the quality varies is when the manufacturer puts in the gps chips in their phones as an afterthought rather than devoting enough processing power. A lot of phones tend to "cheat" and use wifi and telephone signals to guess where they are so that they can seem more accurate to the user, rather than waiting for a full lock on to the satellite signal. Keep in mind I read this on the internet, and everything on the internet is true. In the phone manufacturer's defense, the majority of people who use gps on their phone are doing it for navigation, so it does not really matter if the phone is wrong about the user being in the right lane or the left lane, so long as it is the right street and block. For people like us who are trying to find something smaller than a shoebox deep in the woods, it's definitely a "non-standard use".

Much to my wife's dismay, I don't have a clue about vegetation - I wouldn't know the difference between a pine tree and a Pinto. I'll have to do some research on the type of tree I chose once I find a suitable location. I like the idea of wide webbing, I'd been thinking of two - one over the top to hold the weight, one around the trunk to stop it swinging around. I do want to reduce the weight as much as possible, though it's a fine balance - too much weight will stress the tree, not enough and it'll bounce and swing in a light breeze...

Thank you for those tips, I hadn't thought of tyre tubes. By "pipe" do you mean like the white pvc pipe used for drain and water pipes and stuff? Or some other type of pipe?

That totally sounds do-able! Do you recall what the straps were like, meaning, what material they were?

Hullo Aussie cachers! I'd like to put a wooden bird house style cache in a tree but I'm not sure what the preferred method in Australia is for positioning in a tree in Australian conditions. The first option I thought of was including a long wooden hook as part of the structure. Making the whole bird house easy to put in and out of a tree on a suitable branch. Even if the cache sits for months on end without being visited, it shouldn't affect or damage the tree. If this was done by extending the back up over the top, then that might leave a weak point where water could get in. The second option I thought of was chain, threaded through a bit of garden hose. The chain is there for strength, some excess chain can be left on the loose end to extend the chain as the tree grows and the hose is there to protect the tree from the chain. It should work, though I'm not sure how long the hose would last. I assume chain on its own would start biting into the tree after a while - which could damage it. Wrapping the chain in some other material may be better, but I'm not sure what else would be suitable. The third option I'd thought of was some of that webbing material (similar to seat belts or straps on back packs), but I thought it would be too susceptible to fraying and deterioration from sun damage. Has anyone here done a birdhouse tree hide?

I just recently saw one on reddit, someone found a TB and had trouble logging it. Had been out of circulation for a while. Edit: found it - this TB was missing for ten years and 17 days! Now back in play.

It's not as reliable, but now that we can't see what caches a user has found, I've looked at what souvenirs a person has collected as a rough indicator of activity.