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sydnsue

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Everything posted by sydnsue

  1. Nowadays I tend to use my smartphone (Galaxy S8+) for searching. I used to use, and still have, a Garmin Oregon, but with the pre-downloads and the limited cache storage, I have found the phone much better, especially as I log immediately rather than ploughing through them when I return home. How often have I been in an area which is just outside the cache radius I preloaded? With this in mind, and because there is always the poor signal risk, I contacted Garmin who are close to where I live, and asked if they had any means of linking the Oregon to a phone, or if they had any products to achieve this. They replied stating they had no product or apps that can link with phones or the internet and there was nothing in the pipeline. I find it incredible that they appear to be ignoring the obvious in this online age. Has anyone found any method of overlaying the live Geocaching.com data onto a Garmin or similar? Am I the only one who has ceased using their handheld and moved over to Geocaching.com by phone?
  2. Chilehead and HHL - You both use the same system which is a good idea. I shall give that a go. Thanks. Mineral2 - I have an older Oregon and the internal memory is measured in MBs but can't remember how much. The average GPX of 1000 caches is around 1.5Mb so it can make a difference. I'm not sure how to check the memory size. Also the only microSD card is that with the maps on and considering the cost, I would rather not write to that card. I had thought about updating to a newer device but this works fine for geocaching. Thanks.
  3. When creating Pocket Queries on the map, the selection is based on a radius. When creating another adjacent area, the radius obviously overlaps the first query and therefore hundreds of caches will be duplicated. This results in a second GPX file that is bigger than it need be. I know the individual caches will only be listed once on the device but this still uses up device memory. Can this be avoided? I am sure many members have already suggested that the radius search should be replaced with a drawable area or maybe a rectangle. This would remove this problem.
  4. We have been trying to shade in all the counties in the UK on our profile. We have just returned from a holiday in the Lakes and the Dales and we grabbed many caches in South and West Yorkshire. I updated the profile in MyGeocachingProfile but I see these 2 counties still show unshaded. I checked the caches in those 2 counties and see they are listed as just Yorkshire. How do I fill the counties if the caches are not listed correctly?
  5. Just to clarify, PQs are no longer emailed. There is a notification email sent when a PQ runs, but the PQ data is no longer included in that email. You have to download the PQ data from the server, or via the API if you're using an API-based app. That's what I meant.
  6. Yes there is. You do not need to actually run the PQ to test the results. Submit it without selecting a day to run and you can play with the results as much as you need to until you get what you want. Major problem. I tried this but even though the day was left empty, each time I adjusted the date and clicked submit, that submit counts as a PQ and very quickly I hit the 10/day limit. After adjusting the date, the cache count will only update after a submit. UPDATE - I just checked the PQ instructions and it does say about leaving the day unchecked, so not sure why it counted my submissions. It never has counted them for me, and I just tried it about 6 times (in case this just changed today) and none were counted. Are you absolutely certain that the "Days to Generate" boxes are blank in both the Pocket Query itself and in the list of all PQs? I double checked and both were empty of ticks. I assume it was the 10/day limit I had reached because I could not get a PQ emailed when I tried. It would not add to the PQ list. I will try again tonight.
  7. Or you do it with the help of this page (a trusted Groundspeak Api partner). http://project-gc.com/Tools/PQSplit Hans Just had a look at this. Will give it a try. Thanks. As they say "It's good to talk". Tried the PQSplit but the areas in the filter are too large. It had North West England listed, but this area has tens of thousands of caches.
  8. Yes there is. You do not need to actually run the PQ to test the results. Submit it without selecting a day to run and you can play with the results as much as you need to until you get what you want. Major problem. I tried this but even though the day was left empty, each time I adjusted the date and clicked submit, that submit counts as a PQ and very quickly I hit the 10/day limit. After adjusting the date, the cache count will only update after a submit. UPDATE - I just checked the PQ instructions and it does say about leaving the day unchecked, so not sure why it counted my submissions.
  9. Good to know about the overlapping. The PQs I use will be saved for the next visit - just a refresh needed, so I need them all. I use a 600. Good but I wish in this age of cheap chips, it was better CPU. Laptop? I take a rucksack, camera gear, tripod, nibbles, wife, dog. That's more than enough for day in the hills. I suppose I could strap the laptop to the wife.
  10. Or you do it with the help of this page (a trusted Groundspeak Api partner). http://project-gc.com/Tools/PQSplit Hans Just had a look at this. Will give it a try. Thanks. As they say "It's good to talk".
  11. Split the area by "placed during." Set up several PQs, all which cover the entire geographic area, and set the first one for, say, all caches hidden in 2000-2005. Use the preview and adjust the dates until you get just under 1000. Then set the 2nd PQ for the next date range, such as 2005-2006. Continue until you get all the caches up to current. Thanks. That is exactly what I was doing but trying to hit the 1000 mark was the difficult bit, but I never even thought of preview. As I stated in my post - idiot.
  12. Thanks for the advice everyone. I never thought of using preview. Idiot. I'm not even a newbie. I had all the filters running to minimise the selection. The area we will visit is a large area (the Lake District & Yorks Dales UK) and we simply do not know where we will be walking. I'm a waterfall photographer so the rambling can be pretty diverse and random. Nice to hear the Oregon will not duplicate repeat caches in memory. Makes sense but did not know. Once again, thanks to you all. Guess what I'm doing this evening.
  13. I use PQs regularly but we are about to visit an area that has several thousand caches showing. We will be travelling all over the area so I need to load the whole area into my Oregon. Here is the difficult bit to explain. PQs will only find the first thousand so dividing the area into 1000 cache segments will overlap & create multiple repeats, all of which increases the GPX/zip file size unnecessarily. There is also the risk of missing caches in the gaps between the radius overlaps. I have read the way round this is to filter the caches by date, but there is no way of setting a date to grab the maximum quantity of caches without testing each with a submission. This will quickly overrun the daily limit as many tests are needed to hit a figure just below the 1000 limit. Is there a better way to this? Ultimately I want say 5000 caches in my Oregon with minimal file size so as not to max out the memory. I still think in this age of cheap memory and bandwidth, the 1000 limit is way too low. If I could grab the whole area and the 5000 caches in a single PQ, this would not be a problem. Thanks for any help and apologies for the long query, but it is a difficult one to explain.
  14. Thanks to all who have replied to my query. I shall create a route although that may take some time to do to limit the hits to just the service areas. I had wondered if there was a list of all service area caches, but obviously not. Maybe a future project.
  15. We are shortly travelling to Scotland from the south coast so it would be a good way of increasing our counties list if there were any caches in the service areas. Towing a caravan we do not want to leave the motorway. Short of zooming in on the map for the whole route of 600 miles, is there any listing of all service area caches?
  16. In my stats, there seems to be a contradiction of cache finds. Caches found 359. Total caches 318. Can't see why there is a lower number. I have also noticed the Counties map is not updating. Took a screen shot but could not see how to place it on this page. I have just found I needed to add a Myfinds PQ to mygeocachingprofile.com. Everything is now updated, but this leads me to another question. If geocaching.com bought mygeocachingprofile.com, why do I have to do this. Surely the stats should upadte automatically, or am I confusing myself with the 2 sites?
  17. I've checked all the posts I can find on this but the answers don't seem to go far enough. I use a Dakota and when I download the Pocket Query I get both gpx files. Normally I transfer just the main gpx to the Dakota. If I also load the wpts file, will this automatically associate with the caches in the main file? I look at the wpts file in EasyGPS and it is just a long list of waypoints that appear to have no association with the caches. I suppose I could just suck it and see, but I don't want to foul up what is already in the GPS.
  18. I am using PQs to transfer data to my Dakota 20, but the hints are not being carried over. Is this normal?
  19. Thanks to LondonTavern, problem solved but the mystery deepens. As promised he brought his laptop with him, logged in to geocaching, connected my Etrex and it worked perfectly. Transferred the Etrex to my PC and it works. We made no changes to laptop, PC or GPS. We didn't look at drivers, software, firmware...nothing. I know a lot about computers but this is unexplainable. Somehow his laptop "nudged" the Etrex with something. Sounds crazy but we did nothing else. We tried his cable and mine, and both work. Bottom line is that everything is working. Thanks LT and thanks everyone else for your time.
  20. Is the connection/interface on the GPS set to Garmin connection? Yes it is. In fact I tried all the other options also to no avail. LondonTavern has kindly offered to to visit us this evening after work as he has solved this problem for a couple of others. Fingers crossed.
  21. Once again, thanks for all the suggestions. We found our first few caches today, despite all the brambles. I found one immediate problem that confirms the idea of paperless. I entered a wrong coordinate. There was no way I was going to walk 64 miles to the next cache I pumped in 10 caches before we went, and it took a while. The bottom line is.......we enjoyed it instantly, so if I can't get this Etrex to talk nicely to the PC, then I shall Ebay it, and get a better model. I am sure there is a thread on here discussing the models, so more reading needed.
  22. Hi Bear & Ragged - had already done all you suggested but still no luck. It will not show the GPS info, I just get an error stating no information was received from the unit. Jason - As you say, a bit restrictive. I can see that and we haven't even started yet which is why I was trying to start the right way. I can see the benefit of being able to enter several caches in the form of a route. We have many many caches listed where we live. Londontavern - The fact that Fugawi is talking to the Etrex, yet geocaching and EsyGPS are not, is what perplexes me. I know computers so I know it is a software or driver problem. The problems are still there after Fugawi has closed out. Believe me, I have tried everything.....I think. As Jason stated above, the serial/USB converters don't seem to be very reliable with some software. To be fair, Garmin Communicator that geocaching.com uses, states there may be incompatibility with serial/USB connections. Looks like I need a notebook and do it the hard way.
  23. Thanks for the replies everyone. We intended going to the meet down at Pompey tonight, but something has popped up so we can't make it. Maybe the next one. I delayed replying because it turned out the cable I bought was faulty, so I waited until the replacement arrived. Mixed success. I use Fugawi so I entered a route and it sent it to the Etrex no problem. I then tried sending coordinates from Geocaching, but it said no device found. I tried sending using EasyGPS but that also said no device found. Seems strange that Fugawi can see it, but not the other software. It looks laborious entering manually but I will try it just to get a few caches. If we enjoy it (I'm sure the dog will) then it looks like a more expensive GPS will be needed (unless the above has given anyone a clue to what is wrong). Thnaks for the replies, and if anyone has any more suggestions............
  24. Hi Is there anyone in the Southampton area or better still near Chandlers Ford who would be able to offer guidance to us. I haven't even tried a cache yet as I am having major problems trying to get my computer to talk to an Etrex, which I gather is a well known problem. Possibly I need to change to a better GPS, but before I start spending large sums of money, it would be good to speak to someone face to face who could get us on the right track. If anyone has the time, me and the wife would be very grateful. Regards Syd & Sue
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