souperteam

GIRL SCOUTS OF ERIE SHORES GEOCACHING INTEREST PROJECT PATCH To earn this Interest Project, you must do (7) seven of these activities, including the starred activities: Two (2) Skill Builders One (1) Technology One (1) Service Project One (1) Career Exploration Two (2) activities from any category that you choose Purpose: To increase one's knowledge and understanding of geocaching (high tech treasure hunting)! Please note, you will need a GPS receiver to complete this Interest Project. Many late model cell phones have GPS receivers in them. Skills: 1. *Learn what GPS stands for and the history of GPS. Who invented GPS? Why was it invented? 2. *Coordinates are the keys to utilizing GPS. What are coordinates? What is longitude and latitude? How do they help a GPS receiver work? Using a GPS receiver, practice identifying your location using coordinates. 3. Geocaching is only regulated by the people finding and placing caches, meaning everyone involved needs to follow rules and guidelines. Using www.geocaching.com, identify the three basic rules for geocaching. Make a poster with these rules, and add a few of your own that will help Girl Scouts to remain safe while geocaching. 4. *Identify a cache you would like to find and go on a high tech treasure hunt! Be sure to follow all local and Girl Scout safety standards. Technology: 1. Visit www.geocaching.com or www.navicache.com to learn more about geocaching. With an adult, create a screen name for your troop/group so you can explore different caches in your area. Find out how many caches are within a 25-mile radius of your troop’s meeting spot. 2. Find out how GPS units work. What are the basic ways a GPS can tell you your location anywhere on the earth (hint: it involves 24 satellites)? 3. Visit www.geocaching.com to learn about Travel Bugs. What are they? How are they used? If you want, purchase a Travel Bug, and with an adult’s assistance, start tracking it! Service Projects: 1. Using the guidelines on www.geocaching.com, create and place your own cache. Be sure to register it on the same web site so others can enjoy it! 2. Invite a Brownie or Junior Girl Scout troop to go geocaching with you. 3. Help a Brownie or Junior Girl Scout troop earn their Geocaching Try-It or Badge. Career Explorations: 1. Brainstorm at least 5 careers in which a GPS receiver is utilized. Explore how using a GPS unit has changed the nature of at least 3 of these careers. 2. Talk with someone who uses a GPS receiver in their daily job. What is the GPS receiver used for? What do they think GPS receivers will be used for in the future? 3. Think about your future! Play the role of a journalist and write a review of your geocaching experience. How did it differ from what you expected? What did you learn? What did you enjoy? What would you change about your experience? If you want to get others excited about geocaching, submit your review to your school or local newspaper.

Girl Scouts of Erie Shores GEOCACHING JUNIOR BADGE To earn this badge, you must complete at least 6 of the following activities, including the starred ones. Purpose: To increase one's knowledge and understanding of geocaching (high tech treasure hunting)! Please note, you will need a GPS receiver to complete this Interest Project. Many late model cell phones have GPS receivers in them. 1. *Learn what GPS stands for and the history of GPS. Who invented GPS? Why was it invented? 2. *Coordinates are the keys to utilizing GPS. What are coordinates? How do they help a GPS receiver work? Using a GPS receiver, practice identifying your location using coordinates. 3. Geocaching is only regulated by the people finding and placing caches, meaning everyone involved needs to follow rules and guidelines. Using www.geocaching.com, identify the three basic rules for geocaching. Make a poster with these rules, and add a few of your own that will help Girl Scouts to remain safe while geocaching. 4. *Identify a cache you would like to find and go on a high tech treasure hunt! Be sure to follow all local and Girl Scout safety standards. 5. Visit www.geocaching.com or www.navicache.com to learn more about geocaching. With an adult, create a screen name for your troop/group so you can explore different caches in your area. Find out how many caches are within a 25-mile radius of your troop’s meeting spot. 6. Find out how GPS units work. What are the basic ways a GPS can tell you your location anywhere on the earth (hint: it involves 24 satellites)? 7. Geocaching is a relatively new “sport” that uses GPS receivers. Brainstorm other new “sports” that would use a GPS receiver. Make an advertising sign describing your new GPS sport. 8. Think about your future! What kind of job could you get where you could use a GPS unit? How would using a GPS unit make that job easier (or harder)? Write a want ad for a newspaper describing this job!

My Brownie Troop earned the Geocaching Try-It from Erie Shores GS Council last year. They had a great time. I'll post the requirements for the Junior level badge and the Older Girl IP as well. Maybe it'll help other groups get something set up locally. Girl Scouts of Erie Shores Lorain, Ohio 44053-3820 (440) 233-6112 Email: info@girlscoutserieshores.org Web Site: http://www.girlscoutserieshores.org --------------------------------------------------- Girl Scouts of Erie Shores GEOCACHING BROWNIE TRY-IT To earn this Try-It, you must complete at least 4 of the following activities, including the starred ones. Purpose: To increase one's knowledge and understanding of geocaching (high tech treasure hunting)! Please note, you will need a GPS receiver to complete this Interest Project. Many late model cell phones have GPS receivers in them. 1. *Learn what GPS stands for. Why do you think GPS was invented? 2. Latitudes and longitudes are big words, but they are very important for GPS units. One goes around the world east to west, and the other goes around the world north to south. Find out which is which! 3. Geocaching is a relatively new “sport” that uses GPS receivers. Learn what geocaching is and why it is so much fun! 4. *With an adult, visit www.geocaching.com or www.navicache.com to identify a cache you would like to find and go on a high tech treasure hunt! Be sure to follow all local and Girl Scout safety standards. 5. Visit www.geocaching.com or www.navicache.com to learn more about geocaching. With an adult, create a screen name for your troop/group so you can explore different caches in your area. Find out how many caches are within a 25-mile radius of your troop’s meeting spot. 6. Pretend that you were going to make a cache for a Girl Scout from another country to find. Where would you hide it? What would you put in it? Write a letter to the Girl Scout so she knows why you included each item.

We had a dollar bill origami cache here it Tucson....had. It was a puzzle so it should have been a little harder to find but when we got to the location it was in a very busy walking park. We left some cool folds and swapped them dollar for dollar with unfolded to restock it. Someone came along and stole the whole thing. Bugger. It happens.

There are other varieties that look kinda like one but they aren't the same. I spent most of my youth in NM and never saw saguaro there and I live in Tucson now and the folks at the Saguaro Natl Monument are pretty adament that they don't grow anywhere but in the Sonoran desert. The sonoran does not spread to NM so I have to vote with your wife...no saguaros in NM. Sorry.

Thanks...that's what I was looking for. Don't want to buy another program if it produces the exact same thing. Sounds different though. Thanks again.

We just went out of town and this is the information I had on my PDA to match the waypoints loaded into my GPS. I did it all with GSAK (using the Export to HTML files option) and Plucker. Is this what Cachemate creates? http://www.nmassociation.org/souperteam/

Just curious since I haven't used it, but what does Cachemate do that the HTML option in GSAK doesn't? The description on the Cachemate page sounds very similar to GSAK. Am I missing out on something whammo?

I use GSAK to load to the GPS and then I export to "HTML files" and use Plucker to get them to my PDA. http://www.gsak.net/ http://www.plkr.org/ Added: The following site explains how to use Plucker to get the files to your PDA. http://www.geocacher-u.com/resources/paperless.html

People could use sites like this one: http://www.theimagehosting.com/ No need to host all of the photos here, but it's fun to see some of the stuff people come up with. As it is right now, photos are posted in every section and well, maybe I don't want to wade through the gallery to find the "fun" stuff.

Until I signed up to get pocket queries, I was using the .loc files too. I saved them all into a folder and then ran the OPEN GPX/LOC function on GSAK. You can then save all of the waypoints to a file that MapSource can work with and import. You can also just have GSAK load the waypoints in the GPSr. http://gsak.net/

Try installing GSAK and see if it will interface with it. You may not need anything else. GSAK has an option to download the waypoints in the GPS unit. I don't know if you can get MapSource without the GPSr.

I picked up a Zire21 on ebay that works great and it uses the same USB cable as my Garmin Etrex Vista C and my Sony Mavica digital camera. I use the pocket queries, GSAK to load the waypoints into my GPS and then export the information to HTML files and then use Plucker to get the pages to my PDA. It's a quick process for me.

I have recently "messed up" my preloaded maps by loading CitySelect maps to my unit so I can't test it out but.... Go to the Setup Menu, Routing Setup and what does it show? I have mine set to Prompted, Prompted and On. Make sure that you don't have Follow Road or Off Road set as your Guidance Method. When I select Find, Geocache, and select a waypoint, I am given a pop-up that asks if I want to Follow Road or Off Road. If I select Off Road, it will give me the compass and the Found, Note, Stop menu and an "as the crow flys" type of line. If I select Follow Road it will not give me those options but it will give me the route to take using prompts and follows the main roads.

Someone did that with a cache we found on Kauai. It was a little tricky to find the right one and there were no DNFs after we replaced it. One team couldn't find it so they left a "replacement" and the next finder found the original one. Why do some people find it so hard to log a DNF? We replaced a container at another cache but we knew for certain that it was gone. The cap to the film canister was glued in place but the rest, including the log were gone. There were a number of DNFs before us. We notified the owner on that one and he was grateful. If we had not found the lid though, we wouldn't have put a replacement there and would have had yet another DNF to our name. Log the DNFs folks...that's all part of the game.

ROTFLMBO! No, not the whole pole, just the little metal cover at the base...usually covering the huge bolts that hold the pole to the cement base. We've been to a few where the base has been lifted a good number of times and the paint is scratched off of the pole. There was one where we lifted up and thought it was an easy grab...but wait...the cache wasn't under there...hmmmmmm. Where could it be if not there?? BTW...we log all of our DNFs and go back another time to find them. We have a couple in Yuma that are still DNFs for us but someday...victory will be ours.

Well, I noticed that a fellow Tucson cacher has at least 3 in their possession. Hopefully they will make their rounds and we'll see them sometime soon.

When using the Advance Search option for TBs, (http://www.geocaching.com/track/search.aspx), the resulting page gives the following fields: Name Last Log Owner Location Traveled Would it be feasible to add another field that would show either how far the bug is from our home location or at least what state/country it is in? The current location field, while helpful in it's own right, doesn't really help find TBs that may be nearby. An example of why this would be helpful, is that our Brownie Troop is very interested in GCing and the girls would like to find some other scout troop's TBs. There is no easy way to find any that are close enough to go retrieve. Short of doing a search for all "scout" TBs and then clicking on each and every one to find out where it is. It has to be a bigger server load to do it that way than to include one more field in the results. Thanks for your consideration on this subject.

Go to the Setup Menu, Routing Setup and what does it show? I have mine set to Prompted, Prompted and On. Make sure that you don't have Follow Road set as your Guidance Method. When I select Find, Geocache, and select a waypoint, I am given a pop-up that asks if I want to Follow Road or Off Road. If I select Off Road, it will give me the compass and the Found, Note, Stop menu. If I select Follow Road it will not give me those options. (edit: sorry as77...didn't mean to duplicate. Got side-tracked with kids and fiddling with my GPSr and didn't see your post before I put mine here)

We just got a Palm Zire 21 so we could go paperless. It would be really nice having a AAA battery option instead of the recharge cable. I will have to make sure that it's fully charged before heading out every time. I am NOT good at doing that. Half of the time I forget to make sure I have a disk in my digital camera and end up missing out on great shots. LOL! I loaded the pages for our local caches so I could see how it works and I am really jazzed about using the Palm for caching. I used the HTML pages created by GSAK and they look good to me. Much better than cutting and pasting the pages into Word and printing them all from there. I'm sure I'm missing some kind of great feature so I'll keep playing but so far I'm really happy.

We have a Garmin Etrex Vista C and the City Select Auto navigation Kit. It does exactly what you are asking. We just recently got the nav kit and have used it mostly just for caching using the basic mapping that was installed. We used the navigation features and mapping on our recent trip to NM. Some of the maps are off but it was still very helpful in finding where we needed to go...especially in El Paso, TX. The type of units that give verbal commands are really expensive and I would be afraid to take it out of the car to go caching. We spent about $300 on the GPSr and $90 on the nav kit. Best Buy has the kit on sale right now...if they have any left...for $104.

Well, based on the number of soggy log books I've seen (just in dry old Arizona), and smelled (pphhewww), I would spring for the RitR book. But that's just me. Sounds like a neat idea. Hope it goes well. Do you have a college campus nearby? Most of the bookstores carry the RitR notebooks. Maybe they have a better size.

How about one of the official Geocaching Logbooks that are made of the Rite in the Rain paper? If that doesn't work, how about one of the other Rite in the Rain brand notebooks? http://www.riteintherain.com/products.html I'd suggest keeping it in a water-proof baggie too but it sounds like a neat idea.

Well, you know what luck we'll have with getting our family into Geocaching. I don't really know anyone else there that I could get started but I do have a family member that will help maintain it. I'm reviewing the state rules about placing caches and will go through the proper channels to get a permit. While Memphis is not much to look at, it does have some interesting history and I would like to highlight that. Thanks! (Fred and Matt's sister-in-law in AZ)

I'm going to NE to visit family next week and thought I'd do some caching while we were there. There are very few in the area where I am headed. I am actually very surprised that there are none in Memphis or Ashland. I've got a few places in mind for some new ones. I'll have to check out the rules for placement there but I might add a few new ones while we are there.