WeR3

I've been Geocaching for about 2 months. Same time for using a GPS (Garmin Etrex Legend C). No you don't need mapping software to Geocache. There are times it might help you figurire out how to get from where you are to where you want to be but that is part of the fun. I did bye the City Navigator software for mine which I use when traveling to new places. I don't use it much for Geocacinging since most of the cachings so far are close by. The first couple of days I had the GPS I was a bit lost on what to do. Read the manual, try one thing at a time and pretty soon you will be an old hand at it. Good Luck....

We’ve been Geocaching since Christmas Day.. When we started we were a little nervous about muggles and law enforcement wondering what we were up to. Now with a mere 20 finds under our belt we are inspired to keep on geocaching and confident that we can navigate the muggles and law enforcement officers as well. You see, two days before new years we were in Virginia Beach gecaching at Beach Garden II. What was to become our second ammo can find, we were a little stumped when a Virginia Beach officer pulled up and asked us what we were doing. My wife explained rather excitedly that we were Geocaching and the officer smiled. She said, “Oh, that!” with a big grin on her face. She pulled up hundred feet and started to work in her car. After our find was back in its safe hiding spot we went to talk with her. Jackie my oldest offered her a purple frog toy. And Alsion my youngest asked about her uniform patch. She handed us a business card and said, “send me an email and when I get a new batch patches I’ll send one to each of you”. . Well today we got a card and two nice VA Beach police patches. My daughters will wear them with pride. Officer Paniza wrote in the note: “Hi Alison, I hope this card finds you and your family well. I’m glad you enjoyed VA Beach. There is a lot to do here. Thanks for the Purple Frog, he rides in my car. And thank you for the compliment I think it’s cool that your family geocaches together.” WeR3

Excellent. I'm glad you were inspired. I'm now looking for my Palm 3 so that I can do the same as I did for the VX and give it to my daughter. Very cool.

Here are a couple of places to get labels etc. Sissy-n-CR's Geocaching U.

Success 1. Old Palm VX not used in 3+ years. 2. Struggled to find charger - had it in a box of wall warts. 3. Charged Overnight. 3. Tried to turn it on. Dead 4. Searched Internet for Replacement Batteries. Said a few bad words to myself. 5. Read the Palm troubleshooting guide on the web site. AH - push the reset button. And low and behold I have a Palm VX. 6. Installed the palm desktop application. Entered one memo note record. Hotsync success. 7. Installed Cachemate. 8. Ran cachmate on the palm and it ran. 9. Generated 10 query pocket query run. 10. Used Cachmate file conversion tool cmconvert.exe. Imported pocket query. 11. Saved PDB file and auto hotsynced pdb file. 10. Cache pages on the Palm. 11. One happy camper. 12. Will buy the full version of cachmate and load up the palm. The total cost of supplies $8 - Cachemate The value to WeR3 - Priceless! Thanks for the helpful threads.

I have a Legend C. HAving more memory will help when you want to load more than one map segement in at a time. I used my C without City Navigator for a couple of weeks to help me get around town. The base map helped a little. Once I got City Nav I was delighted with the detail with on exception. I travel to a remote location in south Virginia. Many of the roads are missing. I now would not go back without City Nav. I think I heard that City Select is no longer avail and that City Nav is its replacement. Good luck with your purchase. You will love it and have fun.

I have a legend C and use it for both Geocaching and auto routing on the roads. I have City Navigator. The memory size is a draw back because I can only load generally one map segement at a time. For example I live in Richmond VA and travel to the board of VA and NC frequently. I can either load the Richmond and east segement or the one that applies to the VA and NC location I travel to but not both. If I had a laptop I could change from one to the other. Better yet would be a cats meow gps for the car with all US maps loaded. The other challenge is the screen size. It is pretty small which has its own problems. None the less I have used it for both sucessfully. If I had the money I'd have a Street Pilot 7200 or 7500 for my truck. Good luck. BTW - If you go with a hand held still get a car mount.

I got some nitifications last night for publish (I did not set enable) for traditional cache types. How long have the nitifications been turned on?

Thanks all for the feedback. I'll contact the reviewerin advance and I'll demonstrate many finds in advance as well.

I live in Richmond Virginia but go to a lake house about 105 miles away frequently. In the summer we go just about everly week for 2 to 4 days. In the winter 1 to 2 times a month for 2 to 3 days. There aren't very many cahces in this area as you can see by the zip code query for 23927 What is the chance I'll get some caches approved at the Lake if I follow the rules and get the details to the reviewers satisfaction?

Welcome. My duaghters Jackie (13) and Alison have been having fun at Geocaching. I'm sure you will also. WeR3

Cool - Very cool. I'm jazzed about this now. I'm a premium member of GC and will get this set up this week. I'm loving Geocaching....

Thanks - I can use both.

I've read the other recent post on this and am a bit confused. I have a palm 5 something (I haven't used it since my company stopped allowing palm sync software) and want to be able to grab the info page for a way point. We are new to Geocaching and actually have found some of the log comments helpful. Does cachemate provide a way for me to grab the cache description and the top X log comments? Thanks

YOUR ISP To put an image on your own server space depends on your ISP. Many ISPs and most of the bigger ones provide you with the ability to have a small web site. You would use FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to upload the image to a specific place. In most cases if you just want to refer to an image you would place the image in the location of your web pages (more on this in a min) and would not have to create a web page. Some ISPs try to wrap the web site creation part with "easy" tools to use and make it hard to figure out how to just upload a file. To find out what your ISP provides I would check their member web site and see what you can find out. If you are unsure after you look then post the ISP name (earthlink, comcast, aol, ...) here and maybe one of us can look for you. I have comcast and have uploaded other images (not GC ones) with little trouble but it took me a while to figure out how to because they try to make it "easy" to use. Once you get the image uploaded then we can worry about the URL that points to the image. That is the easiest part. PHOTO SITE As an alternative you can use one of the free or cheap photo catalog sites. Pbase Just for Grins here is an image of mine on pbase Flickr I use Pbase but have a paid acocunt. They advertise 30 days free usage but I never had my original free account disabled. They could disable it at any time. I upgraded because of the number of images I was storing there. For flickr (and there are others) maybe someone else can post how the site works and what the url of the image would be. If you get really confused or need offline help send me an email through the GC site (click on my profile) and I'll try to help.

I'm setting up notifications of new caches in my areas. Should I use Publish or Enable as the event trigger. I want to know about cahces that I can go looking for. Thanks

Here is another place for free stencil fonts DaFonts If you plan on doing lots of cans you could try silkscreening as well. Silk Screening Supplies. I haven't used either yet but will eventually use both. Silk Screening has a number of steps but is easier than it looks. My brother used to make money when he was young making t-shirts wby using silk screening and I helped him a lot. Good luck and let us know what you used. WeR3

Not sure anywaone cares but we have a team name WeR3. Each time we go out we have between 3 and 5 people however. Some differing friends and family members without Geocaching handles. What is the protocol for team names and does it matter? Thanks

On my Garmin the circle is the estimated accuracy range. So if the accuracy is 20 feet at that poijnt then the circle would be 40 feet in diameter. My experience (and that is limited to 1 month) is that when I'm out in the open the circle is accurate. When I'm under heavy cover it is not. For example yesterday we were deep in some woods with tall trees. My GPS accuracy was listed at 12 feet to 25 feet but the Cache was at least 150 feet from the initial spot that said plus or minus 12 feet. Hope this helps.

I've noticed several caches hidden in state parks in Virginia and as well have my eye on two parks for placing my own caches. However, most of the state parks have a parking fee. How does this work when the FAQ states that caches are prohibited in commerical places that require a fee? Thanks

The following depends upon your ISP but a lot of ISPs now are doing virus and spam scanning. My ISP is comcast and I can see the files that they denote as spam if I log into their web based mail tool. You may want to see if your ISP has a web based mail tool. Depending on the number of waypoints you are grabbing you may want to not use the ZIP feature. I routinely get 2 MBytes files sent to me in email without any problems. Of course if you are on dial up that may be different. Good Luck.

Go back and look at the pocket query page and see if the query was run at all. The right hand side of the table has the col "Last Generated (PST)" If the value is blank for this pocket query then you failed to specify a run day. (Days to Run). THe far left col shows a preview link. If you generate the preview that will tell you if you specificed a pocket query that returns no waypoints or not. I had a few problems the first couple of pocket queries that I ran and it was all operator errors. I also notice that if you check the current day of week for "Days to Run" then the query usually kicks off and runs within an hour or so (just my experience). This can give you a way to check fairly quickly. Hope this helps.

Double post. Now just a bump...

Way too go! Keep hunting. We are loving it as well after 1 week. 10 finds and 3 DNFs.

We joined on 12/11/05 but did not start the hunt until 12/25/05. We are loving it. We have found the FAQ, the forums and the Podcacher podcast to be very helpful. Generally the tone of the forums is friendly and helpful. Thanks for that. Too many Inet forums are polluted by wana-bees and people with off-topic agendas. THanks for the help so for and the help that will come as we post more questions. We will strive to help others as much or more than we have been helped. WeR3 - Eric, Alison and Jackie.....