Hello everyone. A friend sent me an article that mentioned Geocaching and it sounded terrific. I was so taken with the idea that I started reading up at work today and when I got home I had both c.geo and GeOrg on my Android phone (first gen Droid). I thought about the app from here but the reviews were iffy and it's the most expensive one.
I cannot understand GeOrg and I'm an old network admin and tech nut so that's concerning but c.geo wasn't too bad to traverse and it pointed me to a cache area I know well--a very old covered wooden bridge. The terrain is 1.0 but the issue was the difficulty was a 4.0 and this being my first search I figured I'd have trouble. My son came along (16) and was also taken with the idea. We searched for an hour to no avail when I figured we'd try another cache.
There we were driving the car using the compass in the app going into a neighborhood next to ours but that I'd not been in only to find a wonderfully scenic woodsy area and after a 100m walk and 10 minutes of searching we found the cache, added an entry to the log and headed home like two toddlers with ice cream cones.
My first question is, are these apps decent for the task? Second, the compass was all over the place at times especially at the end. Is it the phones or do even the dedicated GPS units do that?
Also, GPX files for GeOrg. Is it true that really the only clean way to generate them is to spend $30 a year for the Premium membership here? Plus even with that I didn't see where on the site you go to generate them.
Lastly, what sort of things should I bring along? I realized after the fact that I didn't bring a pen (thankfully a pencil was in the cache) and the box was full. Not sure what I could have put in there. I read about coins and such (assume those are the Trackers I've read about) but no such item existed here.