and1969

Glonass is reportedly slightly better at higher latitudes such as are found in the Arctic north of Russia, as the orbit of their satellites brings them nearer to the poles. I live just below 54°N and on my GPS-only satnav most of the satellites are always shown to the south. That said, I used my satnav for caching in Riga, which is at 56°N, without a problem. Similar to what has happened with GPS, Glonass has been partly demilitarised and is being promoted for commercial use so there should be no technical issues with using it in the US. As for any possible political/legal issues, these are unlikely because it is supported on Apple and other US products.

Hi, I mainly went for traditionals and noticed that a majority of the ones in Vilnius, including all three of my finds, seemed to have an alternative description in English. Two of the three caches I found in Vilnius were definitely off the usual tourist track and even the third one outside of the Europa Centre, being north of the river but still only 15 minutes' walk from Gediminas St, is not in a tourist district. Descriptions in English seem to be more common than ones in Polish or Russian (languages which people in VLN may know due to ethnic reasons or having been taught it in school, respectively). Puzzle caches seem very popular in this part of the world and I noticed many of them have a description in English. Perhaps the same is also true of Multis. Cheers And

And now we see the folly of using the wrong ordering. The DMY and MDY date formats are no longer totally dominant. Both are based on the way dates were read out or written - despite which, the US National Day is more commonly called "The Fourth of July" than "July [the] Fourth". I would hope that by the turn of the next century we will all be writing dates as year/month/day. Already, this is the way dates are written in China, Japan, Korea, Hungary, Sweden, Lithuania, South Africa and Canada (Canada still uses MDY and DMY, but the confusion has led to a desire for standardisation). I urge GS to consider a souvenir for 2020-02-02 which is a nice palindromic date, which many of us will be in a position to go for, rather than telling our kids to tell their kids to go for the 01/02/03 souvenir . 2021-12-02 would be the logical follow-up. Some lateral thinking will be needed in the intervening 79 years...

I could not log in with Waterfox 33.0.2 (latest version) on Windows 7 until I disabled Javascript. The green signin button on the /join page does not work with my browser, which is basically a 64 bit version of Firefox and it follows the same version numbering as Firefox. The Sign In button doesn't work on my Tesco Hudl Tablet (Android 4.2.2 and latest Firefox app) either. However https://www.geocaching.com/login/default.aspx works OK.

I could not log in with Waterfox 33.0.2 (latest version) on Windows 7 until I disabled Javascript. The green signin button on the /join page does not work with my browser, which is basically a 64 bit version of Firefox and it follows the same version numbering as Firefox.

I've made cache containers by cutting the tops off PET pop bottles, as close to the flange as possible, then putting two of them on an electric cooker ring, rotating them rapidly till they start melting, then pushing them together, holding them till they cool down. Obviously this is a dangerous task that is definitely not suitable for children. The tops should be ON when doing this. This method of welding is similar to that used to join yellow plastic gas pipes which we will all have walked past at some time or other. The trick is to not get debris inside the 'container', and to align the two pieces accurately. I've yet to deploy one of these as a cache but did find a broken/muggled clip lock container and left one inside with an emergency log, the original log having gone missing (along with the CO, it would appear ). I did mention in the log, that the CO can keep the container when he makes a reappearance. Also I have seen a similar container where the CO complained about people undoing the wrong end. With the containers described above there is not a problem, as pop bottles are designed to withstand high pressures anyway in normal use, and the tops provide a good seal.

It probably is still the case, however as the Greek alphabet has similar characteristics to the Roman alphabet it can easily be substituted for the Roman alphabet on a letter-by-letter basis, for displaying on a device that only supports the 26 'English letters' or the western European character sets. The result will not please language purists, but a Greek speaker who knows the Roman alphabet would be able to read it.

Returned on Wednesday having found 4 caches in LV and 3 in LT. Would have liked to find more but we had other things organised. Regards And

No rules as long as what you leave is allowed in geocaches anyway i.e not a foodstuff or anything smelly or likely to go off, safe for anyone and not something that would embarrass parents if their child found it. I have left low value-Lithuanian coins a few times and these can go in film pot or key safe caches. I am in LT now so will probably bring some more back. This will definitely be for the last time as they are adopting the Euro in a couple of months' time.

Hi I am visiting a friend in Vilnius on the above dates, and will be doing as much Geocaching as possible (he and his gf are not cachers - yet . We will also probably go to Riga for a day or two but I am less certain of the itinerary. I will probably be staying near Vilnius city centre, just over the river on Lvovo g., and am wondering if anyone can recommend any caches in the Vilnius area that are suitable (that is, big enough and safe enough) for leaving travelbugs in. Ideally ones that are not too hard to find, as I don't want to lug them home again. Cheers + many thanks Andrew

Did they decide to use a base-31 numbering system because they wanted to omit five characters, or did they decide to omit five characters because they wanted a base-31 numbering system? They could have just as easily developed a base-30 numbering system that omits six characters. They had to convert to a base-31 numbering system to accommodate new caches. That does not address the question. A base-30 system would also have accomodated new caches. It wouldn't have accommodated as many. Bearing in mind that the system started from GCGxxx, this meant 15x31x31x31 as opposed to 14x30x30x30 possible ID's, a difference of 68865, giving a bit of breathing space while GPS manufacturers were being lobbied. Incidentally I worked on a very similar problem, replacing a software system that - among other things - allocated prefixes in the format A001 to Z999. This was for 8-character codes where the users provided the other 4 characters e.g. A12301A0. We were in the process of replacing the system, when the series was already in the V's, and the codes running out was one of the main drivers. Our new codes are AAAA-ZZZZ. This allows for a possible 456976 codes, as opposed to the earlier 25974. Again this was to cater for the limitation of certain other software that would only accept 8 character codes - our prefix, plus the 4 characters added by the user. We finally got the old system switched off when it was well past Z500. And yes, we do have an exclusion list for certain codes

The hints are output to the PQ as plain text, for example <Groundspeak:encoded_hints>Base of tree</Groundspeak:encoded_hints> The tag is not semantically correct, perhaps the hints were encoded at one time or another.

Perhaps we ought to talk about the 'public' number and the 'private' (or 'secret') number, to reinforce the fact that the latter shouldn't be given to people who haven't seen the trackable. As for 'number' being used to refer to alphanumeric codes, I don't see this as a problem. Most people would know what is meant by a 'car number' or 'license plate number', and most of those are alphanumeric. It is only in small places such as Guernsey or St Helena where a normal private civilian car registration is a true number, and even then there are other vehicles with alphanumeric registrations.

As others have said there is no obligation to swap "swag", although many cachers do seem to expect this. I carry some foreign coins to leave in caches. If your item will not "go off" (food etc) and will not embarrass or upset parents if their children find the item, it should be fine. Do not be afraid to remove offending items without replacing them, as you will be doing a service to the caching community. One time I threw away a "magic tree" air freshener which was stinking a cache out. This is a type of car air freshener in the UK which is made of cardboard, impregnated with a very powerful perfume. Other items I threw away were stones, religious propaganda (it should the responsibility of parents to provide religious guidance to their children), and glitter. A cache near me was vandalised by some local kids using some glitter that a cacher had innocently left.

It WAS send to your browser. There is a Javascript addition on the page, that checks all images on the page after the page has loaded. If an image is not loaded, the complete link is replaced with the 'missing image'. So somehow your browser was not able to read the image; sometimes a simple refresh of the page will get it loaded correctly. I noticed this on a cache page today, but when I viewed the source (something I have not needed to do since the Browser Wars of the 1990s) and tried to fetch the image separately, the image was 404-compliant. If it was not for the interfering Javascript I would have seen a broken image, which is the normal way Firefox indicates an image could not be loaded. Please can content providers not meddle with the behaviour of people's browsers.

I don't think they could deny writing *this*. You do? I don't. Geocaching.com say the ads can be regionally targeted so that might be why. I am in the UK and noticed them on the cache search page.

I was thinking about this problem, and the only honest approach I could think of was the same. Fortunately in my area there are dozens of caches within a half hour drive, including a lot designed as a "quick cache'n'dash". I've got one 'saved' which I saw while driving past. On balance he is probably getting more benefit out of caching, doing that than getting all the souvenirs. Only 8 days into the Silly Season, I already got sick of one cache a day so logged two yesterday. Could have just memorised the location of the second one in case I got desperate for a souvenir, but preferred to sign it there and then.

This could be done by setting the souvenir to hidden. There would still need to be a record kept in the database, that a user received a souvenir and declined it. Otherwise people who didn't want a geographical souvenir would get it back if they cached in the same place again. From my own perspective I am not really interested if someone in another part of the world - or even in my home town - cached on IGD and each day of August, but am interested in where they have cached. It would be useful to separate time-based souvenirs from the geographical ones, but with geographical and time-based souvenirs (Megas etc) grouped with geographic ones. The reason being, that to get geographic souvenirs away from one's home area will usually take more effort than getting one of the time based ones. For cachers in countries with a lot of caches anyway.

I am not even going to try that one. There aren't enough caches around me to access anymore without a lot of time out of my day. If I get one on a day it will be nice, but do I really want my page cluttered with AUgust 2013? I've set myself a target of one cache per day but, as things stand at the moment, I am not really a souvenir fan - the UK souvenir has a very stereotypical image and so does the proposed England one, and as for the proposed Wales one which I will also get if it is ever approved, it has a very generic image. The Great Britain souvenirs all seem to look like old fashioned railway posters from the time when rail companies, in the decades before the railways in the UK were nationalised, used to encourage people to visit holiday resorts, travelling by train of course. If GC.com could have copied the "Skegness is so bracing" poster for the England souvenir, instead of a very stereotyped picture of the white cliffs of the southern England coast, I might be a bit more enthusiastic However I will make a special effort to get the souvenir for International Geocaching Day 2013 (2013-08-17) and would urge other cachers to seek this goal, no matter how disillusioned they may be feeling.

Hi, Garmin nuvi's can certainly be used, if set to "off road" navigation. They have the ability to enter coordinates directly in all three common formats, or you can load caches as POI's or favourites. As for accuracy they should be no less accurate than any other civilian-grade GPSr, providing they are set to "off road" navigation, otherwise they might claim you're on a nearby road. I suggest looking at earlier threads on these devices, which really need their own pinned thread.

Yeah, that response gave me a giggle at first. Hundreds, probably thousands of websites rely on Google's geocoder service for things like postcode lookups, etc. Something tells me that if it was a Google problem, there would be a lot more noise being made from other websites too and that they (Google, that is) would have fixed it by now. Buuuuuttt.... Try this - it's a sample page for Google's geocoder, set up by Google themselves. It too puts my old British postcode in Germany, just like gc.com does, lending support to GSP's 'not our fault' claim... Interestingly enough it works fine almost every time if you just enter the first part of the post code - I'd suggest trying the same with the gc.com postcode search - Google seems to ignore the second part anyway. There ought to be no need for Groundspeak to rely on Google for UK postcode coordinates. UK postcode co-ordinates are available from OSGB (Great Britain only) and the Office for National Statistics whose dataset covers Britain and Northern Ireland. Their datasets use the British and/or Irish grids, but can be 'easily' converted to WGS84 lat/long; I use the word 'easily' confidently, because Groundspeak already perform conversions to the British grid in the opposite direction. Although, a cache I looked at at random in the RoI (GCZCFZ) offered a British grid reference. Converting from the Irish grid refs to WGS84, uses the same algorithm as the OSGB one, but with slightly different coefficients.

^This The author is describing a cache, not a geocache. Apparently he thought these were synonymous, which we all know they are not. +1 This is referencing a cache(incorrectly called a geocache) as in a survival or end of the world situation, where this is a good, but not accurate description, which I won't get into because it's off topic. Context-you have to look at the hole story-or in this case just a paragraph. This is a problem when a land manager hasn't read the context of paragraphs in adventure books . It will be up to a CO to explain the finer points, when land managers have heard that "Geocaches are buried containers of canned meat, alcohol and pipe tobacco". Yes, it is probably an error to assume that nothing other than letterboxes, or orienteering paraphernalia, were hidden in the wild before the geocaching era. Many years ago, when civilian-grade GPSR's still had 100m of error and were hideously expensive, a work colleague (coworker, for North American readers) gave me a photograph of a small cairn by a small lake, and a hand-written poem. This was a clue to the location of some "swag" on the Isle of Arran, which I'd said I'd be visiting. After spotting a similar lake, with a somewhat larger cairn next to it, I demolished the cairn and uncovered a 20cl bottle of whisky - probably Bells - which had been buried for several years. (The label and the lettering on the cap had long since become illegible) It is still, to this day, the nicest whisky I've had the pleasure of drinking, and I've tasted many expensive single malts. PS. To this day I still wonder if I should have "traded", in case others had a copy of the same puzzle. In mitigation, at least I rebuilt the cairn...

You need to set your nuvi to "off road" navigation then "she" will take you directly to Ground Zero. This mode obviously is useless for planning routes. However your nuvi will "count down" the distance to GZ quite accurately. I have a nuvi 1310 and it will still display the road being travelled while set to off road navigation. It is a pain to keep changing the navigation mode. The easiest way is to keep car navigation set to "fastest route", "shortest distance" or "least fuel" (if the 455 has that mode) - whichever you prefer - and set bike navigation to "off road" and use bike mode for caching. Then you just need to touch the car/bike icon in the top left corner to change mode. Bicycle mode is functionally identical to car mode except that it probably routes along cycle paths, and also if the satnav notices a speed above about 50 km/h/ 31 mph it asks if you want to change to car mode. Which is not a problem if you're using the device on foot for caching. (I find the pedestrian mode, that only displays a 2D map - with no distance to GZ - useless for caching.) See my review of the 1310

I've commented several times on the Nuvi - perhaps this should be a pinned thread somewhere. My dad's ancient Nuvi 200W supports entry of lat/long, as does my slightly newer - but still rather elderly - 1310. If buying a newer Nuvi it would be worth checking if it has a coordinate search. The approach I take is to have the caches as points of interest. I wrote some software to convert pocket queries to CSV, which I then run through Garmin POI converter, but I believe GSAK will also do this in one go. To cut a long story short, to look for the cache it is best to use the automotive mode and "off road" navigation. The satnav will draw a "road" toward GZ, which can be followed until you are 10m or so from the cache. After that, you need to get the distance to the cache as low as possible. Bear in mind that there can be several metres of error with the GPS reading, and this is worse in woods and areas with high buildings. Although a dedicated hand-held GPS has a similar potential for error. You also need to consider the possible error on the GPS reading taken by the CO. I have used a Nuvi 1310 for all my finds (39 - 38 on GC and one on another site) and in at least 90% of cases the GPS was critical to finding the caches. BTW I would not suggest buying a Nuvi just for caching but if you have one, give it a go...

It is perfectly valid to do this. In fact in countries where civilian ownership of GPSr's is restricted, such as Cuba, this is how caching is done most of the time. I found a cache recently without the aid of a GPS but it was in an area which I know well. However if you are a "purist" who will only look at the clue and any photos *after* you've failed to find the cache by other means, you'll probably need to get a GPSr. Anyway give it a go. The worst that can happen is that you don't find the cache...