blindleader

"The coordinates were a bit off." and similar statements are at the top of the list of most meaningless things ever posted in a cache log. Don't pay any attention to them. When someone posts their own coordinates for your cache, and they're more than about thirty feet from yours, then you can start considering them. The only time I post coordinates in a log is when I am pointed consistently to the same spot at least two error circle radii (the =/- or EPE number) from the cache and I have very pleasing pattern on the satellite screen. Even then I rarely make a claim that they are any better than the published coordinates. I just consider them another data point. If several people comment that they found the cache some distance in the same direction from GZ, then you want to consider taking more readings.

Which will be completely useless if you don't already own an older version of City Select. Go with the gpsdiscount.com link.

Wow. 500 caches in 2.5 miles. You sure that isn't just the first page of search? The densest area I've see is around Mountain Home CA, where the radius for 500 caches is about 6 miles. I gotta get to Silicon Gultch sometime to pad my numbers. The way to get all the caches within a given radius is to submit multiple queries centered on the same point but with the "date placed" range specified to limit the results to less than 500 hundred caches. Make enough of them with non overlapping date ranges to cover from May 1, 2000 to the present. You could do the same for an entire state or country by selecing that state or country instead of a center point and radius.

In five minutes the geometry of the received satellites could had changed enough to affect the estimated uncertainty. Also fresher WAAS data could have been in the process of downloading during the interval. Finally, are you sure the satellties you were receiving and their WAAS status did not change during that time?

Check box - [include Child Waypoints], Uuper left corner of [send Waypoints to GPS] dialog box. When importing the PQs to GSAK, you will have to have selected "Child Waypoints" as the way to import them rather than as independent waypoints.

Unlikely. WGS84 is the standard for transfer of waypoint data between GPS devices and anything else, and it doesn't mattter what datum is set in either device. You don't mention what your mapping software is, but if it makes a difference what datum you're using (again unlikely), then that software has a serious design flaw. I'm not sure what you mean by "Canada Datum" is, but NAD27-Canada differs from WGS84 by about sixty feet in Kentucky. Close enough that I wouldn't make any assertions about what datum the hider was using, unless it was in some urban area where you could get better coordinates using high resolution satellite photographs to improve on GPS fixes. Contrary to what you might feel in your heart of hearts, there's nothing special about Texas. WGS84 is the one that works worldwide, even in Lubbock. All geocache coordinates are referenced to WGS84. Perhaps your expectations are unrealistic. Sometimes the GPS will report your position within a couple of feet of your true location, and sometimes the error can be well over fifty feet. Furthermore, it isn't always easy to tell one from the other. At the risk of beating a dead horse. It's already done, not encrypted, and posted at the bottom of the cache pages beneath the oldest log. Don't worry, as you gain more experience, learn the limitations of the system, develope skill in searching, operating the GPS system, and interpreting the results, you won't be sidetracked into worries about datums and maps and such. And just to make sure that horse never makes it to the starting gate: WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 WGS84 edit: PS to comment on this log. :) Don't ever ever ever do that. Only the cache owner can determine if a cache is missing for sure, and replace it. Neither you nor any of the others who DNF'd this cache really know if you were in the right place.

You may notice that the statement appears in the special "My finds" box, which generates a PQ consisting of all your finds.

Are you old enough to remember the talking cars of the early eighties? Few things are more obnoxious to most people than machines that talk. Although turn by turn directions may be one of the very few justified uses for machine voice, hand held units are not appropriate for this type of technology because of the extra wight, bulk and power consumption it entails. That said, voice generally doesn't convey anywhere near the amount of information that an accurate graphical representation does. Drivers just need to learn a proper instrument scan like pilots do. A glance of less than one second should be enough to absorb all the information needed from a display.

It's because I stole your WAAS bird. Well, that might be the problem. The satellite you were probably getting WAAS corrections from before, is in the process of moving from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and has probably moved too close to your horizon for you to pick it up reliably. Fear not. More WAAS satellites are on the way later this year. In the mean time. Don't worry about the accuracy of your coordinates, especially with 16 ft uncertainty. That's pretty good. Probably 99% of all the caches out there were placed without the benefit of WAAS. There are a number of techniques you can apply to try to improve your coordinates (and autoaveraging for ten or twenty minutes is not one of them). 1. Use mission planning / satellite prediction software to pick a time when the satellite geometry is best, and take your fix then. You still want to take a number of fixes just to make sure the one you use is not an outlier. 2. If the cache is in a place with identifiable landmarks nearby that can be seen on satellite photos, use USAPhotomaps to check your coordinates. In some urban areas, in some cases you can get a fix down to 1 ft this way. 3. If you were really a masochist, you could take an average of multiple readings, but the course in probability and statistics that you probably didn't take in college would tell you that the only way to get a valid average involves making multiple visits to the site at all hours of the day and night over a period of several days, recording your fixes, the received satellites, and exact times by hand, and then crunching the satellite geometry numbers to weed out the less than excellent fixes. An alternative to all this would be to hire a surveyor with differrential GPS to get a sub 1 meter fix in a short time for far more money than you want to spend.

.25 m/pixel in color in quite a few urban areas. You definitely want a high speed connection and a gigantic disk drive.

It definitely should remain until it is specifically deleted by you, even if you delete the gpx file that it's associated with. I 'm assuming you aren't doing anything else than exiting the program and restarting it, or shutting off the PPC and turning it back on. There are three ways of deleting field notes: 1. Individually by opening the note and clicking [Delete Note] 2. by [File][Reports][Field Notes] with the Delete Selected Notes box checked 3. running [Tools][Field Notes Cleaner] I've never had your particular problem, but if I did, I'd uninstall and re-install GpxSonar. As an added precaution, if you have a memory card installed, that you install GpxSonar on that and not in main memory. That way, Mr. Bill's evil software (Windows) is less likely to muck up GpxSonar.

First, the image must already be hosted somewhere online. Not true. The right answer is: Click on the [upload Image] link in the navigation block in the upper right corner of the cache page.

I'm not interested in a flame war about what GSAK should and shouldn't do, so I'll just offer the simple work-around. Make a filter that matches the PQ. When you update the database with the PQ, run the matching filter Sort on the Last GPX field. Now the stale caches will be at the top and you can either update or delete them. (I don't know why anyone would delete a record from a database, but that's another rant entirely.) I maintain a database of all (Over 5,000 active) physical caches within a 100 mile radius, using a series of PQs that run throughout the week. Works like a charm and only takes a few minutes each day to update the far fewer than ten newly archived caches that pop up.

There's a multi here in Seattle with a waypoint in Alaska and another with a waypoint in California. They are fairly easily done without driving or flying thousands of miles.

I adopted GSAK a couple years ago to manage my caches, but I still use Easygps occasionally, when I have to create a bunch of waypoints by hand. The "map", which shows to the right of the data fields, merely depicts all the waypoints in the file in physical relation to each other. Do you have that right? The words "Waypoint name/" don't appear anywhere in my installation of Easygps. The "GCCxx" is actually "GCxxxx" and that's the uniquely assigned name of the waypoint. Why do you have to change it? If you really want to change the waypoint name, it's easier to do it before transferring to your GPS. I don't know about you, but I tend to make mistakes when I enter coordinates by hand. The machine doesn't make those mistakes. Also, when I go caching I usually load anywhere from ten to eight hundred caches in my GPS, so hand entering is out of the question.

The Contact Cache You'll be doing extremely well to solve the puzzle by this weekend, but it's worth it.

Date placed on a cache page is displayed as mm/dd/yyyy. On the cache page input form, the owner doesn't have the option of deciding. There are three pulldowns for selecting the hidden date. On search results pages, both placed and last found dates are displayed as dd month yyyy.

You can also upload pictures to your profile for linking and nobody can see them unless you post the url. On your edit profile page, click [change/edit] under "Your Photo: shown in your profile".

The web site says it resizes pictures if they are more than 800 pixels wide or over 125Kb in file size. In my experience, it doesn't always do it and I've uploaded files up to 200Kb, and over 900 pixels wide. My information could be out of date. For best results, resize you pictures on your own computer to avoid having geocaching.com do it for you. That way they will look the same after uploading as they did when you created them.

You probably selected *.loc format. To get description and log information you need to select *.gpx. It's at the very bottom of the PQ input form. Another way your problem could have occurred is if you opened the gpx in EasyGPS and saved it again from that program before loading it into GSAK. Then you'll loose all that extra information.

The PQ name is part of the subject line in the email that deliveres it. You could save the attachment to a new file name using that subject line. But the best way to manage PQs is with GSAK.

I've had an InvisibleShield on my MAP60C for the past nine months. I've dropped it in puddles, on the forest floor, on the car floor, and on pavement. It seems as if the only thing that can leave a permanent mark on it is stone, concrete, or steel. The few marks from these events are miniscule, so I haven't bothered to change it, even though I have a spare that they sent me for free. As others have said. the shield is very clear and doesn't degrade the view of the screen in any significant way.

Bremerton: The boundary for the Seatle Urban area terraserver coverage runs just East of the Warren Avenue Bridge at UTM 527900E. They are in color at .25m/pixel, were taken in 2002. They can be viewed using either Google Earth or USAPhotoMaps Pretty much the entire US is covered with 1m/pixel B&W photos taken in the mid nineties. Edit: A few of the areas covered by the .25m/pixel color are Seattle, Anchorage, Portland, SanFrancisco with Silicon Valley, Washington DC, Denver including Rocky Mountain National Park. I don't know if there is a definitive, up to date list of them but the easiest way to find out if an area is covered is to zoom in on it in Google Earth, or go to the known latitude of the place in USAPhotoMaps and try to download them. USAPhotoMaps is my prefered tool for this, but if you want to collect these maps, you'll need a gigantic disk drive. The thirteen hundred square miles of the Seattle area takes well over10GB.

This might be the thread. In the pacific NW. the classic hide is so common and obvious in the woods that nobody ever even refers to it explicitly, just saying "the usual place" or "classsic NW hide". I suspect that in Urban California, it involves lamp posts in Wal Mart parking lots.

Ooh, have you picked a nasty area to try for FTFs. I assume your interest is prompted by the high pitch of the FTF competition in the city of Seattle. If not... Well either way, you're in for a humbling experience. As the original Tiresome Usual Suspect, I can tell you that if you don't sit at your computer minute by minute watching for new caches, you'll need instant notification by email on your cell phone, along with a willingness to head for the door as soon as the phone rings to be in the race for most of the new caches around here. I get FTFs only by the chance of fortunate timing anymore. edit: The way to watch for new unfound caches on the cheap (and cumbersome) is to bookmark This page.