ZingerHead

I love finding them, so I figure I'm just spreading the joy .

Now who's getting personal ? In the end it's a tempest in a teapot. I will continue to enjoy the grandfathered virtuals, hoping that they will be maintained or adopted so we can maintain geocaching access to spots otherwise unavailable. Overall this is a terrific website, and I am still enjoying the game, so life as we know it goes on. Nobody's come up with a better mousetrap - Groundspeak must be doing something right. But I still won't waymark. And you can't make me .

That's right. We need to keep educating those lowly newbies on the right way to enjoy this game . And I think tellling them their caches suck is a giant step in the right direction.

I'm with the majority here - we need to keep in mind that we almost always cache on other peoples' property, and property owners will not be impressed by geocachers breaking their rules, however arbitrary or inconvenient those rules are. Funny as some logs may be, in a different light they are destructive to our ability to geocache. Those logs have a long life, and it looks like they can come around to bite us. We run the danger of building a reputation as a bunch of risk-taking, rule-averse thrillseekers with little regard for the rights of property owners. Some may have <winked> at this in the past, but in the past there were a lot fewer caches and cachers. As the game grows in popularity, more and more landowners are going to become aware of geocaching. That awareness can lead to more access, or it can lead to more closures.

Thank you, minion.

That's been my experience also. I "hid" a virtual along the Appalachian Trail in CT - it's NPS land, so no physical cache is allowed. There is a terrific view as your reward for a 2 mile round trip hike. And it gets very very little traffic. That's why I think the loss of virtual and locationless caches isn't going to spell the end of geocaching - I think many, possibly a majority, considered virtuals less "cache-worthy" than traditionals. But this summer I was in Acadia National Park in Maine, home to some of the most amazing scenery this side of the Mississippi. Again, NPS land. There are a handful of virtuals there that we visited - places we would otherwise not have seen. This is my sole gripe with the loss of virtual caches - it walls off some truly spectacular areas from further cache placement. And before some Groundspeak minion comes along and playfully tells me I can find all the virtuals I want on NPS land at Waymarking.com let me say that I just don't want to visit another website. I like this one. I like the way things were. I don't like these changes, however well intentioned. I will get over it. But please don't tell me to go to Waymarking.com. I am a geocacher. Not a waymarker.

Waymarking sucks, but I'll get over it. Geocaching will not die from these changes. If Waymarking will make life easier for the reviewers, then that's a good thing. Land managers are unlikely to be more inclined to allow physical caches just because there is no virtual alternative. We can always make multis with interesting points of interest as intermediate stages (thus preserving the very BEST of virtual caching) with a lame Wal-Mart micro final stage, since those are worthy of the title "geocache". Groundspeak is not a democracy, but we can gripe anyway if it makes us feel better. Are we done here?

It's weird that it's correct some of the time and wrong some of the time. That doesn't give you much to work with, since any settings you change will screw up the "good" readings. Any chance it was just bad reception, so that you would have poor accuracy?

Wait a few months. You'll see an eTrex with the new chipsets soon enough I'd wager. I'd market it that way - put it in the "higher end" units first for the early adopters, then roll it out into the more affordable segments later on. Isn't that how the color screens were introduced?

On my Vista the little plastic flange that kept the serial cable snug against the contacts broke off - I just used a rubber band to maintain pressure between the cable and the gold points. I don't think a loss of gold means a loss of contact - and the pencil eraser idea is a good one even if there is no gold - it will remove any sort of gunk that has accumulated there. I'd also try another cable - it might be the cable and not the GPS.

1. When you stop having fun. 2. Not bad form at all.

/Zingerhead steps onto soapbox..... I disagree with the "alligator" analogy - ANYBODY can take one look at an alligator and realize that it should not be messed with. Sharp teeth, looks strong, and it can obviously move. Electricity is invisible - you CANNOT tell, just by looking, whether something is live or not. And if it is live, you can be killed just as surely as if you went up to that alligator and stuck your arm in its mouth. With so many other places to hide a geocache, what is the point of tempting fate by hiding them in electrical equipment. And as far as electrical equipment with no conduit attached is concerned - what if the conduit is fed through the wall? It would terminate inside the equipment, and you would not see any external indication that the guts were live. YOU CANNOT SEE ELECTRICITY. And don't think you have to come in direct contact with electricity to get zapped. Arc Flash is a very real hazard. The amount of energy available at an electrical outlet varies, but it's almost always enough to generate a very hot flash. If you are standing within a few inches of that flash, you will get burned. How burned depends on the available energy, but let's say its a pad mounted transformer - you would probably have most of the skin facing the fault burned clean off your body. And you would have never touched a live wire. Just don't screw with it. You CAN'T tell, you DON'T know, and it CAN kill you. I've witnessed short circuit testing of electrical equipment. Trust me, they conduct these tests behind bulletproof glass for a reason. Look at it this way - if you were standing in front of an electrical generator, would you shove your hand into that spinning mechanism? Of course not, because it would shred your arm. Well, guess what? That mechanical energy (that you can SEE by the way) is converted into electricity by the generator. So by sticking your hand into a live electrical circuit, you are essentially doing the same thing as sticking your hand into that generator. Please, don't hide caches in electrical equipment. It's just a bad idea. What an Arc Flash looks like..... /steps off soapbox

Welcome to the "walking with a purpose" addiction .

<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Lucky, the Ungroomed Schnauzer

To Pofe, our local reviewer - the Cachemas series is proof that you are willing to go the extra mile for us - thanks a million, and have a very happy new year!!!!

To download coordinates from the website to your 60CS, use EasyGPS which is free software. You open your .loc file (downloaded from the website) in EasyGPS, then use its send feature to transmit the coordinate data to the GPS. As for manually entering coordinates, that fussy rocker button is the only way to do it, which is why downloading is soooo much better . But you'll need to know how to enter coords manually on multi-caches, since you will be given new coordinates along the way that you'll have to enter in. The FAQ will give you step by step instructions on how to do it, but basically you hit MARK, which creates a waypoint where you are standing, then you edit that waypoint's symbol (optional), name (optional) and coordinates (required), using the rocker button and the little keyboard that pops up on the screen. After that hit OK. To hunt the new waypoint, hit FIND, RECENT FINDS, and the new waypoint will be sitting at the top of the list. HTH

There are a lot of opinions on this, so take your pick. There's no shame in logging a DNF. Useful feedback to the cache owner and other potential finders is good, so a note or a DNF would be a good idea to explain why you aborted your mission. Having said that, I am not exactly religious about logging all my DNFs. Today I went after a simple parking lot micro, and there was big semi parked directly in front of the cache. In my mind, this was not a DNF - I didn't get out of the car, so I have no idea whether the cache is there or not. The truck will move sometime, so it's not like it's a permanent impediment to somebody finding the cache. I don't know how interesting or useful a "truck was in the way" log would be to anyone, so I'm not going to log it.

"Redirects" is a new term to me, but most multi-caches "redirect" you from some point you know to a new point which can be a cache, or another pointer to the next stage of the cache. The number of stages is up to the hider. The redirection can be a micro cache with coordinates, instructions indicating you should pace off x feet 180 degrees from your present location, to numbers you must use to calculate coordinates using some formula that you're given. If you found coordinates, or clues that you can resolve to coordinates, then they should have taken you to either another set of coords, or the final cache. I'd drop a line to the cache hider asking for clarification if the cache page wasn't clear. I'm sure they'd be happy to help.

Jestjuggle has a blog here.

You're doing it right, believe it or not . Stick with simple caches - traditional, not multi, regular sized containers, not micros. That is the simplest type of cache to find because it's large, and there's only the one thing to find. As the others have said, don't concentrate too much on the GPS - it's done its job once you are within a 30' diameter area around the cache. It's an extremely rare occurrence when your GPS zeroes out, you look down, and there is a cache at your feet. Almost never happens. I'm not familiar with your GPS model, but if it has mapping capability I find it useful to look at the map while I'm closing in to orient myself to the cache based on my direction of travel.

It's funny, but I went through a similar period when I started caching. The first few that I found were pretty easily located, then I tried some harder ones and found them easily too. The trouble came when I came up against one that I just couldn't find. 15, 30, 45 minutes pass and I'm starting to think all sorts of unkind thoughts about the hider. The frustration was making me half crazy, but I kept at it. A half hour later I find the thing, and suddenly the hider is a great guy again, the sun comes out, you get the idea. That's when I found out that one of the most rewarding aspects of this game is conquering a difficult hide. Don't get me wrong, I'm still a sucker for 1/1 roadside micros, but my most memorable cache took me 2 days and over 14 HOURS of searching to complete. If all I ever found was caches that I could locate in 5 minutes I'd have gotten bored and moved on a long time ago.

You're pretty much locked into buying Garmin's proprietary software - other packages like Delorme, etc. won't work on the GPS. That's the bad news. The good news is that City Select is excellent - I highly recommend picking it up for your new GPS. You'll have autorouting over detailed street maps, and you get all the maps for the US and Canada. It's overkill for geocaching in your immediate area because you already know all the streets. But on vacation, or if this GPS addiction really grabs hold of you, you will find your GPS is the best navigator ever to ride shotgun. HTH

I've still got a rabbit I picked up near a cache a couple of years ago - poor thing was skin and bones, obviously a pet due to his coloring and since he was just sitting out in the open in the middle of winter. Never saw an animal tuck into a head of lettuce like this little guy did when I got him home .

It's a good question, and I think it comes down to "relativity", as in "you judge your caches based on the ratings of those around you". I will likely never see, let alone cache, the Matterhorn, so I don't have any problem with somebody labeling a 15 stage multi with 17 miles of bushwacking included as a 5 star cache right here in CT. And there are some puzzles coming out around here that the NSA would find challenging. So if you want to call it a 5/5 because the Clayjar system says the rating fits and the cache stands head and shoulders above the local caches in difficulty and terrain, go ahead. You can always de-rate it if somebody decides to top you .

I used an eTrex Vista for about 3 years before getting a 60CS this year. It's been terrific. The color screen is an enormous improvement over the B&W Vista - I can quickly see which way to turn when navigating on the road. The Autorouting is fast and accurate. The reception, compared to my Vista, is improved - this is not based on any sort of testing, just memories of cringing whenever a cache hunt took me under heavy tree cover. I have not had as many moments where the GPS goes numb and can't get a lock. The USB connection lets me download 56MB worth of maps in minutes - it used to take about 45 minutes to download 24MB into my Vista. I would highly recommend the City Select software. Without it you are missing out on one of the best features of the 60CS - the autorouting. And the POI actually come in handy when you are on the road and want to find a gas station or restaurant. In case I haven't made my point yet, I love this thing. It's very well made, and I can vouch for its waterproofness . Shop around online for the best deals - I've seen them offered just under MSRP in mail order catalogs: Amazon usually discounts them significantly in comparison. After saying all of this I recently got to play with an etrex Vista C. It has the same software as the 60C, but it's smaller, and you can operate it with gloves on a bit more easily than the 60. It's still got that cursed patch antenna, so I would be surprised if it can hold lock as well as the 60. But if you want a more compact unit, this one is worth a look. HTH