MikeAndHike

I was reading about Galaxy 15, very interesting, and realized I really don't understand GPS! I just know that my pn-40 works well. I can get +-2m in my house. But what I am interested in knowing is this. Is there a way for me to check which satellites my pn should be finding? Is there a program or website that will tell me the current satellite constellation over my location? And if there is can you give me some pointers on understanding the info. I am going to go fire up the pn in anticipation!

or "Best Swag Ever!"

He did find it! What a trooper!

I would say Drumheller and the Dinosaurs should be making the top 16. Especially as this is taking place in the Badlands. Anne of Green Gables for PEI or maybe the Bridge. Haven't cached long enough to know of any spectacular caches. Our whole family is excited for this. Can't wait.

I haven't had to sign in since I changed my avatar. Has to have been over a week at least. Running chrome on Win 7.

I have been reading the help files and just couldn't find what I needed but of course as soon as I ask on the forum I finally find my way into the right area. Figured out I was looking in the wrong area. Found my way into the mFilter help files. Then just stumbled around until I found what I needed. $d_UserData="on site" in case anyone is interested.

Okay so I want to set another Highlight function but can't figure out how. I have googled and searched the gsak forums to no avail. You are my only hope! Unless I sign up to another forum, but I don't want to. What I want to do is create a highlight for when User Data = on site. I've tried: User Data = on site User Data = "on site" "User Data" = on site "User Data" = "on site" I should mention I have zero programming/scripting experience and knowledge but am eager to learn. If anyone knows of a good book that would teach me the right kind of language that gsak uses I would be eager to buy one. Thanks for your help.

That's awesome! Mine is my handle and the public domain logo and my national emblem. Really self explanatory but I like it. Might tinker with it as time goes by.

Going to start by saying that this forum has an incredible amount of very friendly very helpful people. Thanks again to everyone for their advice. I am using a hybrid method of those posted. I am using a combination of User Data and Highlights and Corrected Coords. I didn't even know about the highlight function in GSAK until you mentioned it. I also created the opposite highlight. Lets see if I can do this: CacheType="U" and (HasCorrected) Red for unsolved, Green for solved. Makes it easy to manage as I am a very visual person. Now a couple of questions. 1. Do highlighted caches still get sent to my gpsr? 2. Can I create a Highlight that will look for specific data in the user data field? ie. Highlighting caches orange that have "On Site" in the user data field. And is there a way to make on highlight higher priority than another? I am hoping that my 2nd question above will allow me to sort these none at home puzzlers out. Thanks again.

Thanks for the advice everyone. And a special thanks for a cool macro to Chrysalides. I haven't started playing with macros but I think I shall half to. Seems far to handy to pass up. Again thanks to all it was a big help. I will try out your ideas and hopefully everything goes peachy. If not, I'll be back!

Good Morning All, I figured I might as well get a head start on some puzzle caches for when all the snow does finally go away. So I sat down and started teaching myself how to solve puzzles. Many are still way to difficult for me but I have read all the relevant threads and am starting with some easier ones. I have started on One Bad Ant's puzzles as they are near enough I can actually go find them and some are easy enough that even I can solve them. My question is not about solving however. It is about what to do once you have solved them. Other than go find them that is. What I want to know is, is there a "best" way to input your solved puzzle co-ords to GSAK? Do you just edit the co-ords manually in the edit screen or is there a better way? Is there then a way to mark which puzzles are solved yet unfound? I wan't to be able to tell on my gpsr that puzzle cache "X" is solved, good co-ords, but puzzle cache "Y" is still unsolved! Is this possible? I hope this made sense!

That sounds like a blast. Hopefully by next winter I will be a semi-pro finder and ready to take on some challenging winter finds like that. And in other news, I found a cache today! I had to run into the next town and had time to try for one cache. So I checked my GSAK database for a recently logged cache in the area. Bingo one found 10 days ago! Snow was deep and my boots got filled but found it I did. Victory!!!!

I Think you are right on the mark. I don't really know what I am doing yet. I don't have an experienced eye for where a cache may be hidden. I will be doing a lot of caching this year. I hope to be able to enjoy next winter better. Actually as I was looking up Dorothy I came upon a Ghost Lake Island cache that would have been great to grab when I was in Cochrane a few weeks ago. I don't know if I would still be brave enough to walk out now. But that is one advantage to winter, island caches are no longer boat necessary. I would have gotten my first 5*! And amen to the no Mosquitos!

Not to detour the thread, but which ghost town? (I'm an avid ghost towner as well as a cacher.) As the ghost town is also likely barried in snow I will allow it It is Valley Ghost Town not to far from Drumheller AB and about 50km away from where they are hosting Best of the Bad Mega. The other day me and the kids were out walking around town throwing snow balls and generaly making trouble, I am a good role model, and we found a car under a snow bank when my son heard a loud metallic thud as he was climbing it. The snow bank that is. No sign of the car from outside at all. We have too much snow. I am at least going to be kept quite busy for the next week so hopefully I can distract myself from this urge to rent a back hoe! This will also allow me to pick out some prime winter caches!

A lot of great responses. Thanks to all. It's not that I don't enjoy getting out in the snow. I am an avid snowboarder and used to do biathlons in my teens. I have snow shoed and have Army Cadet winter survival training. It's just that the snow is 4 feet or more deep here still. Vheather, I had the same thing happen yesterday. Walking off trail towards the cache in knee deep snow. 32m to go straight ahead. 1m further and FWOOMP! I was in it up to my belly button. I considered slogging through but I knew that the cache was on the ground and didn't fancy having to try and locate it in the area under all that snow. Now if I had some scuba gear I might be tempted. I am going to try and do some cherry picking this weekend. Look for a couple that have been found this last week and just go get em. I have to say that I just can't wait for the weather to support geocaching rather than make it more challenging. I am new to this and the caches are hard enough to find with my newby eyes that I don't need 4 feet of snow getting in the way.

That's a serious piece of hardware. I haven't had a chance to fire one yet but they do have one at my local range. Might have to give it a try. Gun laws in Canada don't allow for the carrying of side arms. Sure would make a guy feel a lot safer though.

I honestly don't remember how I came to learn about geocaching. I think it was from someone telling me about the Best of the Bad Mega this summer. How ever I learned about caching the result was the same. I fell instantly in love with it. It combines all of my favorite things! I love the outdoors and grew up in the bush, literally! I love to go sight seeing and find those obscure yet cool things in the middle of no where. For instance I had no clue there was a honest to goodness Ghost Town within an hour of where I live, until it popped up on a PQ of mine. I am lovin' Geocaching! Sounds good, right? Arg!!! Snow!! Why did I learn about geocaching in the winter? Why did I buy a new gps in March? I was so excited yesterday when my New-to-Me PN-40 (Thanks Gunguy&fam!) arrived at my door that I bundled up the kids to go test it out. First cache is under roughly four feet of snow. Okay, Next! Ah ha we found it! We think!?! If it is what I think it is it is Encino Manned in Ice! Why????? Oh yeah it's winter despite what the calendar says. In the last five days we have had pretty near one foot of snow. Okay, okay, I hear ya. Check the attributes, right? Wrong, many, if not most, of the caches in the area are pre-attribute and have not been updated. Check to see when they last were logged? That is a great idea friend. But just because they haven't been found doesn't mean they couldn't be found. Or does it? So today I decided to head to greener pastures and do some running around that needed doing. So I headed to the nearest city thinking maybe some urban caching would be more winter friendly. I was wrong. At least on the caches I picked. Thanks for letting me rant! I feel better now. Is anyone else getting frustrated with snow? Let's hear all about it. Let's get some angst against the weather going and hope for spring to come blasting in here and get the poor imprisoned caches free of their icy captivity.

That battery pack looks amazing. But $50 is a lot of money and it looks like it is available only in the USA. I hope I am wrong on the last part as I would seriously consider buying one.

gc.com app is over priced and over featured to use as a paperless cache app on an Ipod Touch. Get Geocache Viewer. It was .99 when I bought it a few weeks back. It allows you to upload your .gpx pocket queries. You can load as many different .gpx files as you would like and view them all separately. I keep different .gpx files for each area I plan on caching in just to make browsing more efficient. It works great. I can't imagine an app better for viewing the cache info on. It does one thing, allows you to view your gpx files. And it does it better than anything else that I have seen. And it is 1/10th the price of the gc.com app. Considering you can't fully utilize the gc.com app on a Ipod Touch this is the way to go. I am not affiliated in any way with geocache viewer. It is just a great app that works side by side with a gps to perfection. Edit: Expanded and Bad Spelling

And I stand corrected! Thanks GeoReapers.

I think I saw somewhere that the event for Groundspeak is Aug 20th, GeoWoodstock? I hope that's right but someone can correct me if I am wrong. As far as 11/11/11 goes that is remembrance day here north of the Border and I would agree with not making it into a caching event. It would be cool to see some memorial style caches published in remembrance however. An event at 07:08 09/10/11 would be great though. I think that it would be cool to make a series of say.... 06 caches to find with a hot dog lunch to follow at 12:13. Hmmm?!? Striving for 06 @ 07:08 on 09/10/11 with lunch to follow at 12:13!

I think it is a great idea. How is improvement ever a bad thing? I have yet to find very many caches, being new to the obsession. I have however noticed that there is definitely good swag and bad swag. April should bring better weather here (we have had 9-10 inches of snow in the last 60hrs) and should mean I get to find a lot more caches, so I am in. Great idea Redfist.

Alberta doesn't have many events listed but it looks terrific. Tres Bien! Using Calgary and Edmonton are perfect. If you wanted to add Red Deer it is right in the middle of the two but probably not necessary. Marvin A this is so cool! Mercie beaucoup! Le calendrier fonctionne très bien! Can anyone tell me if this will auto check for new events? And if so, will it send a push notification when it does add events? Again Thank You, Mike

I really don't understand the problem. Unless the email was in some way terrible and creepy. The CO Cache OWNER is just taking care of what is his by watching who views it. Maybe nobody has found it in a while and he just wants to promote it. Maybe like others have said he just wants to offer help. Now if he emailed you asking for your home address that may be a bit much but really... I don't have a problem with anyone emailing me. The absolute worst thing that can happen is I have to delete a few extra emails today. Best case might meet a new caching buddy. Seems like this is all just a bit of an over reaction. My .02!

Haha I hear ya with upgrading woes. I have just upgraded myself and keep looking for things that no longer are where they once were. But yes that is the logo I meant. If you are allowing others to use it I like it. I could probably whip one up but you've already done the grunt work so I thought I would ask.