mluostari

I broke my collarbone skateboarding, so I couldn't ride my bike or skateboard, and it happened to be summertime...bummer. I was super bored and trying to find something I could do outside while I was recovering from surgery. I heard about geocaching a number of years ago, thought it sounded really cool, but was intimidated by it because I thought I would have to buy an expensive, complicated hand held unit. So I looked into it, downloaded the smartphone app and off I went. within a matter of hours I had found 8 or 9 caches and in the first few days I was headed to places I've never been in the city I've lived in for almost a decade. Turns out the small city I live in isn't as small as I thought. Since then I've acquired a dedicated GPS and found almost 200 caches.

Forgive me if I'm probably the millionth person to ask this, but I can't seem to figure this out. I'm going on vacation soon and want to run a pocket query for the area around the hotel I'm staying at. How do I put this address in without changing my home location? If I have to change my home address, will the query still run using that address after I change it back to my regular address? Some help would be appreciated.

The past few times I've been out caching I've been comparing my Samsung Galaxy S2 to my Garmin eTrex 30. When it comes to easy park and grab caches they perform pretty similarly. You don't need a sophisticated, highly accurate GPS to navigate a parking lot or sidewalk to find micros. Now on the trail or in the woods, my eTrex kicks my smartphones butt. I get a solid stable lock on the satellites, the compass doesn't bounce around and it gets far better accuracy. Today in the woods under deep cover I was looking for a cache comparing the two and my eTrex said it was 27 feet away with 9 feet of accuracy and my smartphone said it was 40 feet away in a different direction with 29 feet of accuracy. The points on the map were even in completely different places. That's a pretty big difference. Not to mention most smartphones are more delicate than baby birds. I could probably kick my eTrex through the dirt on the way to the next cache, pick it up and it would be right on target.

This has probably been asked but I cant seem to find it. I have several favorite caches in my area that I revisit from time to time. I've noticed some of them have gone missing, but are still listed. I think it's a bit of a shame that people are missing out on cool caches. Is it OK to place a new container/log in those places if I'm not the cache owner?

Forgive me if this has already been asked an answered. I can't seem to get the compass on my eTrex 30 calibrated properly. I go through the prompted directions, the first 2 work just fine, but I get to the third prompt and it says "compass calibration failed." Has anyone else had this problem? Am I doing something wrong or is this a common issue with this device?

I've used the official app the last few times I've gone out geocaching and it has worked well so far. It's pretty easy to use, everything is pretty straight forward and easy to understand. I'm relatively new to the game and it has done everything I've needed it to so far. It seems a bit pricey, but at least I know I'm legal now.