Popp-Cachers

I think it depends on the situation. A bug may not want to go in that direction. Example - right now I have a bug that wants to go to the various horse racing tracks around the country. I have logged it in and out of two caches in the past 2 weeks while waiting for a chance to help the bug accomplish its goal. Better than having it sit not moving. In fact, this bug has traveled with me in my caching bag so it deserves to log the miles! My son's travel bug was picked up by a retired couple going around in their motor home. The bug's goal is to get to FL. They went to Maine and New Brunswick first but said they are going to FL later this year. We don't mind who has him as long as he is moving. Just my thoughts.

It has been 10 days now since the devastating hurricane and thankfully help is finally underway for the survivors. Even the animals are being rescued and taken to safety as much as possible. Almost with a sense of guilt, my thoughts turned to other victims of the hurricane: the innocent travel bugs and caches! Obviously not important in the scheme of things, but those of us who have come to love this sport, and those whose travel bug may have been journeying in the south land, we feel a certain unspoken sense of loss. Someday in the future I will be able to release a special travel bug -- and his goal will be to make it to New Orleans for a wonderful rocking Mardi Gras. That, I am afraid, unfortunately, may not be for several years. That city with so much life and history, where music is the way of life, now falls silent and dark. It will come alive again, as will the rest of the devastated areas, with undaunting spirit and collective hard work. Please do what you can to help hurricane recovery from where ever you are. And be safe throughout the remainder of hurricane season and beyond. Kathy

Bummer about falling on your GPSr - hopefully you can get it repaired/replaced soon. I am new to the sport so went the cheapest way -- instructing nextel to turn on the GPS feature on my phone for $4.99/month. It works quite well so far. Sometimes have to wait a bit to acquire a signal although Nextl brags that it uses the cell towers to increase the quality of signal/arrival radius. It does get me within 9 feet sometimes. Had some heavy cloud cover at night the other evening and could not cache. But for the price, it seems to be working really well. Once I arrive at the waypoint location I can turn on the tracking feature to watch my movement in relation to the cache. Does other GPSr's have this capability? I have never seen/used a traditional GPSr yet. Another nice feature is that I can paperless cache by using my webbrowser and go to geocaching.com to get the hints if I need them. I just enabled that feature and look forward to not fumbling with paper next cache! Disadvantage: If I get a call while caching it suspends the GPS feature while I take the call. I may continue reading on this forum to ask Santa for a stand alone GPSr come December. . .

I like to print the cache info page without logs to save paper but refer to the hints, etc as necessary when caching. I have found that when I click for a printer friendly version of the page, without logs, the SIZE/TYPE of the cache (micro, small, regular, virtual etc) does not appear on the page. This can prove helpful when we arrive at the way point so we have an idea of what we are looking for. If this info is already there, can someone please tell this novice where it is located on the printer friendly page? Thanks in advance.

Thanks everyone for the input. I have been using the Nextel and it is working pretty well- the price is right for just $5 a month for now. I have been able to locate about 10 caches now- one a multi cache. However, I have found the comment to be correct, that once you reach the area of the cache you just have to search. The track page is nice but I find it does not update real time and I find myself walking back and forth creating an etch a sketch drawing on the screen! The signal is sometimes hindered under the cover of the trees as well. Thanks for the info about not blocking the antenna with the flip phone. I will pay better attention so that I don't lose the signal. I just love the trimble outdoors adventure planner software where I can set up a trip and send all the way points to my phone at once. I did set up the arrival radius at 33 feet. Wondering if there is a different set up for track page? I did not see that. I will have to go back and look since that seems to be my problem. On Sunday I was literally standing physically next to the cache but the nextel track page did not show this. I know it's not perfect but that was a little frustrating (my etch-a-sketch syndrome). It's been a fun hobby so far. Maybe I will drop a hint for a Christmas present to pick up another GPSr. Kathy

I just started geocaching and the cheapest way was to enable GPS on my Nextel phone. But I am not sure on using it yet and it seems like the instructions say you have to keep moving in a constant direction for 5 seconds to get a reading. That does not seem to help when you are nearing a cache. The reading was all over the place yesterday and we got really frustrated at not being able to find the cache. Does anyone have an opinion on using the nextel GPS and trimble outdoors software? It seems like a good set up - I down load the waypoints to my harddrive, export the waypoints into a "trip" using the software, and then tell the software to send the trip to my phone. It has all the information without my having to type in any waypoints or descriptions. It has tracking and breadcrumbs too. Maybe it's me but I really want to try geocaching and be successful so any pointers would be great. Thanks!