Pasha

I very much doubt that many people get here via the Help menu link, though I betcha Clyde could provide numbers to prove or disprove. My guess is that you and all the other forum moderators are going to be spending a whole lot of time pasting support.gsak.com into threads. If the whole point of creating a separate GSAK support forum is to reduce the constant questions and monster threads in the Units & Software forum, then it seems perfectly logical to put a prominent link somewhere in there. I (obviously) love the program, and so am perhaps not the most impartial commenter, but c'mon.

Sure, I've had the police called a couple of times (out of 400 cache finds). They show up, we explain what we're doing, and in one case the responding officer helped search for a couple minutes. The thing to remember is that you're not doing anything illegal, immoral, or fattening. Unless you're planning on jumping fences or using dynamite to blast holes in trees, you have nothing to worry about at all. If you're still anxious, just go hiking with the kids in one of the parks containing a cache - don't even bother looking for the cache the first time. That's all you're really doing... hiking with a purpose.

From the Map page, press Menu, arrow down to "Text Fields", and choose "Map Only" from the resulting list.

Very interesting discussion, folks. Here's my church-of-wouldn't-it-be-pretty-to-think-so opinion: it is all just land. There should be no distinction between "sacred" land and other land - that implies the other land is profane. All land should be treated equally in terms of respectful use. OK, now that that's out of the way... We have a local State Park here in Port Orchard, Washington in which caching is definitely frowned upon. The ranger has a reputation for being terribly anti-caching, and several local cachers here have referred to her by terms less than affectionate. There was a cache in the park that had been listed for many months but very rarely found, so a friend and I went down there to find it. On the way in, and curious, I asked the ranger with the reputation straight out, "Is geocaching allowed in this park, and if not, why?" I was expecting a very confrontational encounter from what I'd heard about her. Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong. She said that she didn't allow caches and that she actively tried to get rid of them because of their effect on the park's trail system, underbrush, and littoral areas. She mentioned the existing cache and that it was still listed because she hadn't been able to find it. Her sole concern was that not only did caching have a measurable effect on the environment there for the enjoyment of all, but that in trying to have discussions with cache hiders and seekers in the past, the people she'd talked to were militantly assertive of their rights to do this activity in the park and left absolutely no room for discussion. A combative relationship was established that she felt left her no choice but to ban it outright - she reads gc.com because she's interested in the activity in other parks, and would see comments left by people after a cache in the park had been archived due to her ban. We discussed it calmly and rationally for a good hour; she was extremely helpful and concerned that a legitimate use (caching) was being cast in a bad light by selfish people. She gave us express permission to look for the existing cache with the understanding that we would post an SBA log regardless, because it's against the park's rules, and with an understanding of what specific activities she did not approve of, namely bushwhacking, digging, harming vegetation, etc. We did so... didn't find the cache anyway (last find was several months before and it was probably vandalized) but we established an important rapport with a ranger who had previously been said to be unapproachable. She has invited us (the caching public) to place virtuals in the park without limit, because she wants to draw people for legitimate uses, and has also agreed to discuss further ways to allow traditional geocaching with reasonable limitations. I guess the point of my long-winded anecdotes is that this whole situation was created, not necessarily because of damage to the park's environment, but because her concern about same was met with abusive posts in gc.com logs and combative conversations in person. She, like probably 99% of rangers, is concerned first and foremost with preserving the park for all uses, and is naturally going to take the path of least resistance if she has to deal with uncivil responses. Be nice, and it's amazing the progress that can be made.

Yeah, definitely happy with my Etrex Legend. I found about 300 caches with it over about 6 months. Reception in the woods is a dicey proposition regardless of which GPSr you're using - again, I had no problem finding lots and lots of caches in the woods with the Etrex and its patch (flat) antenna. I have a GPSMap 60C as well, and I find reception to be a bit better in bad conditions than with the Etrex, but we're talking about a difference in positional error of perhaps 5 feet. Not much when the average error is 20' or 30' anyway. Putting coordinates in one-by-one is the same as with any other; you mark your current location and then edit the coords to what you want. You can also use GSAK or EasyGPS (sorry, dunno the URL offhand) or any of several others to dump larger numbers of cache/coordinate records into it en masse. There's a reason I keep my Etrex in the car all the time; even though I have something I like a little better now (which also cost nearly three times as much). The Etrex has been a great unit and I see no reason to get rid of it.

Or even easier - http://support.gsak.net/

Own an Etrex and have used USAPM pretty extensively, but have never connected them together if that's what you're asking about. I loved the Etrex itself - small, light, mapping, reasonably good reception.

I generally use GSAK for that since it now shows distances in 1/100th mile increments - just enter a new record, center on it, and voila.

Just to clarify - normally a checksum is the total of all the numbers in the puzzle coordinates added together (47 34.123 would have a checksum of 24). There's other methods but that's the one I've seen most often. There's a local cacher here who has a website similar to what you describe, except you just put in the GCxxxx code, and your answer, and it tells you if you're correct or not. Nice.

There's currently no support for arrays and array operations in the GSAK macro language. However, you can probably do what you want with the SUBSTR function: $locs = "abcde" $num = 3 $loc = SUBSTR($locs, $num, 1) should set $loc to "c". The EXTRACT function would also allow you to do something like that - see the GSAK help page on internal functions. I may have dropped some quotes or something in the above code so it may not work if you cut and paste it. It's 2:40am Christmas morning and I should really be in bed. Hope that helps - happy holidays.

Party, I said.

Blargy blargy it's a party.

CENTRE Location="Home" sets your center point and sorts records by distance from that point. You of course would need to have a named location - see the Tools Menu/Options/Locations. I have Home, N 47 30.967, W 122 36.474 as one of my saved locations, and can then center on my home location prior to exporting to the GPS or whatever.

That's a pretty good choice; my first GPS specifically purchased for caching was an Etrex Legend blue. It'll do everything you need for caching. The maps are something you'll probably end up wanting at some point; it's nice to be able to use the unit to navigate to the cache area, as well as to find the cache itself. But you don't actually need anything other than what's in the box.

You can certainly cache with just what's in the box; after all, all you need is something to point at the cache coordinates. Most units will come with a base map, but that's really not going to be useful in road navigation out of the box because it's so coarse in detail. About all you'll have to do with your first GPSr is to put batteries in it and turn it on. Give it 15 minutes of open sky to locate itself and get the full positional information almanac and you'll be ready to go; put in some cache coordinates and go find it. Of course, after that, you'll probably want to check out automation methods and more detailed maps and paperless caching and ... you get the picture. It's addicting. For automation I recommend Geocaching Swiss Army Knife assuming you use Windows, and becoming a Premium member so you can download Pocket Queries of caches in your area. For further information check out the FAQ linked at the top of this forum.

The first GPS I bought for caching was an Etrex Legend blue; inexpensive but still feature-rich and easy to learn. When I got more serious I got a 60C and love it for the expanded memory, color screen, and caching-specific features. You'll find this is addicting, but that's no reason to splurge on something before you really find out what you think of caching. I'd go with something reasonably priced over something with a lot of features at this point. I started caching with a GPS12 that I got free when I bought a printer about 8 years ago; if the magic box points to the cache, that's all you really need to enjoy the activity.

I'm sorta confused. Are you trying to continue getting new logs for your found caches, or are you trying to get all your found caches into GSAK in the first place? I must confess that I don't see much point in the former case. In the latter case, doesn't the All Finds PQ give you that? I'm lucky - been using GSAK basically since day one (for me, not for GSAK) and so my main database has all those records already; it matches my statistics here on the site exacty in terms of number of finds, DNFs, etc.

In my area of the Pacific NW (the Olympic peninsula), I've consistently enjoyed the inventive hides of Blue Heron, Nana Bear, and Bikerfitz.

As the current en vogue commercial puts it, Happy Christmahannukwanzikaa, especially to those of you who've helped me out with company, hints, and late-night email replies to agonized questions this year. You know who you are.

GSAK needs to install some dll files in your system directory in order for it to run. So you must Install GSAK on each computer you want to use - then you can configure each computer to use the USB drive for your databases. I ran it this way for quite a while, but recently converted back to running the database on the hard drive. The slowdown, even with USB2 drives, is just too much now that my main database has about 3500 records in it. It all still worked fine, just too slow. I find I don't mind the extra step of restoring my database from the USB drive each time I run it on whichever machine. I have GSAK on my work machine and my home laptop each set to backup automatically to the USB drive, then just manually restore each time I start it on the other machine. The speed increase is enough to easily make up for the extra step.

See this thread.

Correct, of course. Noachian is also a general term used in geological circles to reference the time in Earth's pre-history when it was being banged constantly by infalling debris. I just use it to mean, "too much junk falling from the sky."

I'm not going anywhere this weekend unless it stops raining. It's been positively Noachian. Actually, I'll probably end up caching Saturday in between last-minute shopping detail, and probably Monday as well. I just hit 400 finds and want to get to 500 before the 1-year anniversary of my first find. I'll need 100 more finds in the next 53 days, which should be easy enough to do assuming I don't wimp out when it rains.

I guess we assume that'll be for parking coords, waypoints of a multi, etc. I also assume that it'll be integrated into the Groundspeak GPX namespace as well?

Don't feel bad. Googling this same issue it appears that there are some versions that come with only two discs and don't have a separate Setup disc. My assumption is the same as yours and Klemmer et al - there are full versions and there are upgrades. In my case it didn't matter that I already had Mapsource installed, so I guess what I bought is the full version and not the upgrade.