The Frosties!

Above the weather @ Ben Nevis Cachers in the clouds

10 pages and I'm still looking for a sensible explanation from Groundspeak, or did I miss is?

Another vote here for Geocachetrails. There are loads of decent series around here (West Yorkshire), HunkyHamster's cseries were mentioned and I see you've done Oakwell, well done, he's a sneaky hider

There are plenty of public transport cachers, one I know is about to hit 1000 finds in under a year, another is already over 2k (both well beyond me and I have a car!) As you say,a little planning and patience is all that's needed.

Hi new guys, none of you are local to me else I'd invite you along for a stroll, but it might be worth introducing yourselves on the dreaded facebook, probably more traffic there

I think it's great that you're wanting to teach them caching, the more the merrier and anything that acts as an excuse to drive people into the outdoors is a good thing. I use both smartphone and a handheld (etrex 30), the phone uses the same satellites as the GPSr, but is less likely to get a decent lock under dense tree cover the phone can have maps and cache data put onto it to allow offline (no data signal) caching,it's also great for impromptu "I'm in a strange town, I wonder if there's a cache nearby" caching, the etrex is useless for that Phone batteries are pretty rubbish when running gps and a caching app, a few hours on a full battery is about it, the etrex will do about 24, you probably won't be taking them out into the wilds, but imagine the fun 10 miles out with no map,compass or waypoint to navigate to anymore handhelds are generally waterproof, phones significantly less so. If one of the girlscouts drops her phone in a stream while performing a task using it that you encouraged of her, would you be responsible?

Tufty B, I had problems originally, even posted a youtube video showing the sticky problem "in the field", but I've not had it with 2.80, and now I'm using 2.87 and the only issue I've found is the compass calibration is a bit sensitive, it took 2 attempts instead of the usual one when I changed batteries. For caching it's been faultless, give it a try

You tried cache eye? you can measure cache to cache (or detour) on various maps, including OS25, and print out both the route map (centralised around your chosen caches) along with a sheet of cache details, coords, hint etc..

Where earth and water meet..it can get a little messy on the way to GC2MQNK

our 30 froze a couple of times last weekend, pulling the batteries brought it back, still on 2.80 firmware as I wasn't convinced ,87 was worth the bother. Just adding this to show that random crashes aren't specifically .87

nope, that's not normal, I use neongeo and it shows all cache types. on the geocaches page, menu>show gives me options for all,owned,traditional,multi, mystery and other Perhaps you're using the free trial and it's a missing feature?

some permissions are a real pita to get, especially when the person you're dealing with is a bit tardy at relying to emails. Also some organisations have already undertaken blanket agreements to place caches, many of these agreements can be viewed on the GAGB site, I wonder if the agreement with Scottish Natural Heritage would already cover you?

I was just \about to install it, until I read that

As I now understand it the sssi is often on land owned by a 3rd party, the most important thing is to get the landowner's permission and provide the proof of that to the reviewer, english nature have very little say over what activities actually occur on the private land.

Download GPS status from the android market (free) and have a nosey. Pressing the menu key opens up and option to reset the compass, which is worth a try. If all else fails, buy a bluetooth GPS and use that instead of the phone's own - it should be both more accurate under cover and use far less of your battery as you can then turn off the phone's GPS

That's because it doesn't know which way you will be heading, or where you are going. It is not a magnetic compass, it depends on movement to give a heading. Which is why we bough the 30, 3 axis compass=a followable arrow, even at low speed, now it works

I'd lay money that there's a free solution, it's already possible to save other map images as a .kmz and ..erm..do something that makes it useful for a GPS, though I can't remember how off the top of my head, but I bet that can be used with google sat images. Have to agree though, it'll only be practical for relatively small areas

the etrex comes with a basic map, and free mapping for much of the globe is available online

I'm a 30 owner, and agree the compass is worth £30. I also use a HTC phone for caching and it's pretty good, but not as rugged as the etrex Another "extra" with the 30 is the ability to find "chirp" caches, though we've never bothered even looking for one.

There is an app for rooted phones, fasterfix, which would have probably resolved that (I use it on all my droids, and get a lock within about 10-20 seconds)

The etrex 30 (I have one) will hold up to 5000 geocaches (tested myself), waypoints are stored/counted separately. Any more than 5000 will result in an error message as the device boots, but 5k will still be loaded (which takes a minute or 2 first time)

congratulations, and you've got a great little GPS there to start off with As you'll learn, 20 foot is about as close as you can ask, sometimes it'll be bang on the money, other times 20-30 foot off, that's more to do with GPS technology than bad hiding/seeking, around the 20-30 foot mark it's time to put away the GPS and start looking, and even that gets easier when you've found a few you start to learn what to look for.

Thanks, Andy - I forgot about that as well, just grabbed my extra 30 days

nope. could you explain what "tried everything" actually means? I just drop the PQ into GSAK and let that do the sending to the device, but I believe unzipping the PQ and copying the .GPX files into the \Garmin\GPX folder is the other way to do it. Good luck

I've not noticed stickies from the previous build, and figure it's a good sign that this one doesn't even mention it