infiniteMPG

The biggest benifit I get from using the GEOCACHING icon in the Garmin is that you can have a ton of waypoints stored of all kinds of different things and the geocaches are included in with them, but you can do a FIND on just geocaches and as soon as you find the cache you press FOUND, it goes to the next closest not yet found geocache and it marks that last one as found and moves it from the geocaches to just the waypoints. That way you can just see the geocaches you have not yet found by themselves. It saves from having to muddle thru a bazillion waypoints when all you want to see if the next geocache you haven't found. We may have waypoints for parking, trailheads, bridges, POI's, and other things we don't want to have to sort thru to find out if the next waypoint is a geocache or not... efficent? Yeah. Lazy? Probably... And also when you download the data from the GPS back into Mapsource all the geocaches you found now have the icon changed from the closed treasure chest to the open one so to track what you found is a breeze! We'll try the -N feature in GPSBabel as we want all the geocaches to come in as geocaches as we use the description on the Palm TX to see what kind of cache it is Thanks!

When I mark coordinates for a new cache and the related waypoints with my Garmin GPS MAP60C I then download them toe MapSource (6.11.1). I get the coordinates the same as I see them on my GPS : DEGRESS DECIMAL MINUTES ie- N27 12.345 W082 12.345 When I go to enter them in for a new cache listing I have to enter the degrees in one box and the minutes in another box for each directions. Four entries to enter the coordinates, and four times the chances to mis-type something (or have to cut and paste four times). Unless Magellan GPS's or others have stuff totally different why can't Geocaching.com be set up to accept the coordinates the way it comes out of the GPS software? At least enter the N and W coordinates as two entires rather then four. That is the most critical entry for a cache and yet it's set up just asking for typo of numbers. Also, when you get the info back from Geocaching.com you get the degrees symbol. Once again I don't know Magellan or others but Garmin doesn't use the little degree symbol so if you do a direct cut and paste you get the degree symbol and you have to edit that out before MapSource will accept the coordinate (it doesn't recognize the degree symbol in the coordinate valve... go figure!!!). Not sure of the task involved but if Geocaching.com and outfits like Garmin/MapSource could get on the same page it would make things a lot less likely for us lowly users to mis-enter coordinates either inputting them to our GPS's or uploading them for cache listings. I'll step down off my soapbox now.... ) Thanks, Scott aka - infiniteMPG

I just upgraded my MapSource to 6.11.1 and it's great 'except' for one thing. When I run a pocket query and convert the GPX to a GDB file (via CMconvert or GPSbabel) now many of the geocaches come in with different icons. Some come in with the icon for INFORMATION, some come in with the icon for TOLL BOOTH and some with the icon for STADIUM. I think it's using the toll booth icon for micros and the stadium icon for multi-caches but not sure the exact logic of it. The issue is when I upload this info to my Garmin GPS MAP60C the only icons that it recognizes as geocaches is the actual geocache icon. So when I search for the ones with the other icons I have to search waypoints and not geocaches and I no longer have the ability to mark them as FOUND when I find them. Is this coming from Garmin's MapSource program, from the translation software, from geocaching.com or where and what can be done so a geocache is a geocache regardless of the type???? Thanks in advance for your help, Scott aka - infiniteMPG

I have created some pocket queries and ran them but it was rather new to me. I now have a better handle on how to use this feature and it's been a blessing. My problem is I now have several pocket queries sitting there that I don't need anymore. Is there any way to delete a pocket query without having to re-run it and set the option to delete after running? There are several I would rather just delete rather then tax the geocaching site to run them for me just so i can delete them. Thanks for your assistance, Scott aka - infiniteMPG