TetrAmigos

I'll certainly throw my "fat on the fire" with local support from the Ventura County areas.

Just yesterday I found a black micro in a fence pole.. common, not remarkable. I still took the time to post at least a few words about the day's caching experience and where that little micro fit in.

Ive actually seen people who shared the same frustration actually replace the micro with a full blown ammo can. Now THAT'S dedication (but also risks offending the cache owner).

Boy, I hear you. I went out yesterday with the 4 year old and the 1 year old to do some caching.. and that's not easy. 90% of my time is spent tending to the kids, 10% caching. Needless to say we nabbed 4 of our hoped 10 but that will change as the kids grow.

VK, sorry for getting caught up in the discussion vs. the actual goal for your topic! VK is a local team, and I *LOVE* their caches. I can recall one in particular that stumped me on three visits before I finally got it.

I think it's possible as a unified team (read: not splitting up and pooling finds) provided the team plans the run to a tee ahead of time, researches each cache and spends only a specific slotted amount of time at each (irregardless of whether or not they find it). If one person is driving, the other following the GPS and the third/fourth reading up on the cache and/or checking the terrain digitally before they arrive.. it's a stretch. If a team managed to cache 24 hours straight, it would take 4.8 minutes per cache for 300 caches *INCLUDING TRANSIT TIME*. Not likely unless teams split up (or unless Im not factoring something).

This is a genius cache idea and I applaud you for it! Will it be down in the San Diego area?

VA3HST, I cache exclusively with a PDA as my primary device and I've documented how I use it pretty heavily in my blog (see my signature below). Hope that helps! Please don't hesitate to ask if you have any specific questions and I'll do my best to answer them for you. Good luck!

Seconded. Welcome to my friends list both.

I'll tell you, FTF's to me are a blast.. and I've never had one. I don't go out of my way to try and get it, either. That's just too difficult with the kids, work, etc. But I did get a STF once and it was glorious! And Knight, take a breath. We all play by the same rules, but some add more to their experience with the FTF game.

How much space does it take to store the topo maps, say, from all of California on the device?

I always find this kind of societal behavior funny... If everyone thought the way you do, what would happen to the economy? ... nobody buying anything because "the economy is bad".... Seems just kinda interesting if you ask me You're right. I'm heading straight to the closest store and dropping $300 on a new gear. To heck with new shoes for the kids. Interesting, yes. Funny, not so much.

With the kids growing up (read: all kids can walk) we've decided to get back into caching again. The economy being what it is, I wasn't looking forward to buying any new equipment so I set to the task of looking in to my old hardware—a Dell Axim X30 with a paired Holux GR-230 bluetooth and various software—to see if it was functional and worthy of bearing the burden again. Good news is, yes! With a few part replacements including batteries, cables and a case plus an upgrade of software, it's destined to make a worthy geocaching partner again. I'm back to updating the blog listed in my signature, and I've documented the fun of "blowing the dust off of my Axim" in my latest article. Fun! Question for those of you who cache with Pocket PCs out there—are there any preferred software packages and/or programs out there you'd recommend having installed alongside TomTom, BeeLineGPS and Cachemate?

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Ok we'll be releasing the coin. Thanks for the update on the new website, Rick.

The activation code was included, so we are OK. Just wanted to know what had happened.

WTG! We snagged a 7-digit cache just a few days ago but it was an event cache.

US Air Force 1998 - 2002 2T351, served at Misawa AB in Japan, and Edwards AFB in California. Strange time to have been in the armed forces... 9/11 shook the foundation everywhere.

Bad CRC, that's exactly how we cache. Check out our geocaching blog (below in my signature line) -- we posted a ton of data on our Dell Axim bluetooth geocaching setup. If you have any questions at all, don't hesitate to shoot me an email.

Yeah, Im with bell. My PDA is with me 95% of the time, and I use a bluetooth GPSr mouse so it's an all-in-one geocaching unit. Occasionally I'll crack open Google Earth and import my latest gpx download (the KML jumps around too much) to get my bearings.

Hi there southerners! My Alabama-native cousin sent me an Alabama Geocachers geocoin to our home in California for Christmas. We didn't get around to activating it until today, and we plan to send it into the wild with the lofty goal of visiting all 50 states before its "retired." On this coin (sample below) you can see that it references the website www.alacache.com: Unfortunately we were dismayed to find the site listed on the coin down, linking to a trash-link page. Any news on what happened to www.alacache.com? Alabama sure has some unique countryside to geocache in, and I was bummed that I didn't get to cache when I was in Decatur last summer. Sure hope the site is only down temporarily!

I couldn't say, but you've got my ear. So MS Streets and Trips can spit out an optimized route based on GPX imports of waypoints?

Cachemate is a must if you PDA cache. I used GPXsonar for quite some time before I made the Cachemate plunge, and I'm glad I did. They both do the same thing and yes, Cachemate is payware, but it's faster and more full-featured than GPXsonar. That becomes awefully important when you need to go back to a hint, etc. etc.

sbell, could you elaborate a bit?

Queen, would you mind if we linked to your blog in ours? You seem to keep it fairly active, which we love!