oscar478

I have what seems to be an odd situation technology-wise. We have a fleet of 10-12 vehicles that are already equipped with notebooks and aircards for internet access. They also have a GPSr connected via USB. Individually they work fine with any GPS application that I've tried. My problem is, we want to implement a fleet management software that can use our existing GPS devices and internet connection. I have checked with several fleet management companies, but they all work with just their own devices. I know this is doable, I just can't seem to find anyone who has done it before. Any clues out there? Thanks!

Have I missed something? I was going to do the Ohio cache, and I got an email several weeks ago to confirm my address and to expect future info... I've not gotten anything else, and it looks like a lot of the caches are already being placed. I've looked thru the thread, but it's getting a little long to find anything. If I should be doing something, let me know.

I'll second the good words on Cap'n Buckeye. Being a rookie cacher, I got tons of help setting up my first puzzle caches. My other caches have been approved so quickly, I'm beginning to think that Cap'n Buckeye is like Agent Smith in the Matrix... it's not human to be that fast. The only solution is that they must actually be part of the computer system itself

I may be on the pickier side of folks... I will post if someone's coords are off by more than .005, but I generally mention it in passing like... found the cache, my coords were a little east. Or something similar. I figure if everyone did that, it'd be an easy way to get the best average coordinates. Heck, if it were me, I'd put a spot on the log to allow finders to enter their coordinates, or the difference, and publish those as well. Maybe I'm just anal and like good data. I figure the better it is, the more successful finds there will be, and the better for everyone the sport is. I love hiding and finding caches, and try to take the time to appreciate the area of a cache and the journey it takes to get there. Posting purposely bad coordinates seems in bad taste unless you tell people. If people like that, we could make a new cache type "Approximate cache"

I disagree entirely. While I think it's helpful to see some caches before placing them, I think 100 is about 10 or 20 times too many. I've only been caching for a couple months, I've found 24 caches and placed 4. I'm familiar enough with my GPS to do the job. I've gotten several compliments on my caches, dozens of finds and only 1 person to disagree with my coordinates. And that was on a cache where I warned of poor reception, left a waypoint for good reception, and left an obvious clue. While I may be the exception to the rule, I think it would be a major hinderance to not allow folks to place caches soon. Many folks might give up on the sport altogether because they love the idea of hiding a cache, and may have access or ideas about excellent locations, but they just don't have the time to spend a few months finding 100 caches before they place any. This would be especially true in rural areas... where I grew up in PA, 100 caches would have me driving about 50 miles in various directions to take in that many, while not allowing me to further the sport in my area by placing caches. Not to mention the folks with physical or kid limitations and the amount of territory they can access. Or the simple fact that some folks enjoy placing much more than finding... I've seen profiles of folks with 30 finds and 30 hides. Is that someone bad for the sport? I don't think so. If a person places a bad cache (regardless of experience) the logs will show, and from what I've seen the site does a fine job of policing those. If a rule were in place requiring 5 or 10 finds, I think that would be ok and if someone had good reason for the reviewer, even less would be fine.

How about cutting open a metal hair spray or shaving cream can (carefully of course)and making a custom container from that? Or if you want to save work and spend dough, one of those can safes would do nicely... http://www.pimall.com/nais/e.cansafe.html I could see some possibilities of making a cache container out of that jar they use to sterilize things... with the pull up top. If you could hide it under something, a piece of white PVC pipe with the red barber stripe could make for a nice theme.

What are your numbers? Caches found, Caches placed, time geocaching. Me: 24, 4, 2 months. For more info: Size of caches placed: Me: 0 micro, 3 small, 1 regular Cache types Me: 2 traditional, 2 puzzle, 0 multi/offset.

Not sure about permission, but if there were ever a posterchild location to allow Virtual Caches, that would have to qualify.

I just realized that I accidentally dropped this post in the off topic forum, instead of here, where it should go. Has anyone else heard about this?? There has to be room for a micro out there somewhere... Plexiglas skywalk out over the grand canyon, 4000 feet above the river... http://www.destinationgrandcanyon.com/skywalk.html

And you guys expect me to come up with something for Ohio?? They tried this with our license plates, our state quarter and even our hockey team. We've ended up with "Birthplace of Aviation" , reading between the lines you get, we make smart people who go elsewhere to make it big I'm a native of PA, so I pick on Ohio... Maybe "we have more acres of suburbs than anyone else" or maybe "mow down corn, build subdivision"

It's a Jeep Geocache Thing... you wouldn't understand.

Exactly- I read a story a couple years back that some folks from ELF burned a few new H2's at a hummer dealership. Complete and total loss- burned them to the metal frame. A smart, and obviously upset environmentalist pointed out that the burning of 1 tire of those Hummers put more nasty stuff in the air than that H2 would have done in a 250,000 mile lifetime. Not to mention all the hoses, chemicals and other things that got burnt and spewed out.

Ok, I've been around the block a couple times now, still learning some things, but I've found a few things that could be quite helpful. if they exist elsewhere, in some other way, please let me know. Feature #1 Cache management- I've only been caching for 2 months, and have planted 4 caches. I see the page under My Account to list the caches I've placed. I think it would be great if this page could be expanded with some more information. Rather than explain it all, I'll make a quick text snapshot of the idea... Cache Name Age Total Finds Total DNFs Lifetime TB Count Average time between finds Cache1 1200 days 491 15 25 3.5 days Cache2 900 days 85 42 3 15 days Cache3 94 days 25 1 3 2 days Cache4 800 days 9 0 1 94 days There could be lots of other categories, but this is just an idea... something like this would provide a quick, easy snapshot of data to help people be better cache owners. Like Cache2 above is obviously either very hard to find, is missing, or has bad coordinates. Cache 4 is either in a very unpopular place, or if it's a puzzle cache, might be understandable. The data is already in the system, so it could be put in place now, and provide a nice history. I can do this ok with my own caches at just 4 now. But as I plant more caches and develop more history, it would help me a lot to see what works best. Feature #2 Suggested coordinates- This appears to have been happening for a while in the logs anyway, as many different folks with different hardware and experience, get a lot of different coordinates. Maybe an option box on the page when logging a find to suggest coordinates to the cache owner. Would help create some good average coordinates for everyone to be more accurate. Feature #3 Test notification- I've had some difficulty in getting notifications to go to my cell phone. I suspect many others are sending notifications to all sorts of pagers, phones, other wireless devices. It would be a nice quick feature to have a test button on the notification to send a bogus messsage, with the same content as a proper message so people can test their devices w/o waiting for a new cache to be published.

I tried caching with my 3 year old with an old GPS, and it didn't go so well... she loved finding, didn't love the random looping and circling thru the woods for no reason. So if your primary reason for caching is to take a kid, look to a new GPS... you don't have to have mapping, or other stuff. Walmart sells the Explorist 200 for about $114 locally, and it's a fine unit for caching. And with Walmart typical return policy, you can get it, try it, and return it if you don't like it.

This is awesome... aside from a few varying opinions, this forum thread has found willing folks in what 35+ states now in exactly 72 hours... that's cool. I like Americache for the name. I think a note should be made by those organizing this, that each state cache should follow some sort of naming convention, so all the caches can be found and recognized, like "Americache - Ohio". I wonder what the estimated cost to complete this would be? On a dedicated route, it's probably at least what 6000 - 7000 miles at the low end? Plus tix to Hawaii, maybe to Alaska as well... That's about $1500 in travel alone... and how many AA batteries??

There's something to be said for a cool idea. There's something to be said for having a cool idea that is actually used by other people. Even though I'm a newbie to this, I discovered that even basic puzzle caches get painfully few people to participate. I hear lots of good ideas and willing helpers, but how well will all this motivation go in 5 years when maybe the FTF has been done, but few people are even actively attempting it. I think we should allow most states to have more than 1 cache with the coords for that state, not dozens, but definitely more than one... DC, Mass, RI, etc, can get by with 1, but I think a few is acceptable for mid-size states, and maybe as many as 10 for Cali, Montana, Texas, Alaska. Especially if this cache series gets designated as something unique from the GC site, it'd be a shame to look at it in 2 years and see 1 or 2 completions. The folks who have the free time, gas money and desire to tackle something like this is painfully few. Since it would take a while, even with multiple caches in the larger states... I think it could be neat to use this cache as a rating system in itself... like tenure, or military rank or something. Say if we called this cache the Cachemaster, we could say something like "Level 2 CacheMaster" which would be someone who has maybe found 6 or 8 of the state caches. It could top out at level 10 or something. That way, it would be a bit more popular, and it wouldn't be just about 1 final thing, it would be something that builds with a promotion of sort happening periodically. But heck, that's just my opinion.

I think if someone is honestly going to tackle something this large, that a photo taken at each cache site isn't an unreasonable requirement. Especially considering with the price of gas, anyone tackling this cache is looking at thousands of dollars in gas money:) Being that only the most devout, dedicated folks would ever possibly finish this, what about finishing at Groundspeak HQ? I think they would at least spring for a T-Shirt And for advertising, it wouldn't surprise me to find that one of the GPS companies wouldn't toss in a free GPS for FTF...

Excellent idea... if you don't mind a newbie in Ohio, I'll place one for the cause. Might be an interesting way to form teams... awesome if 1 person could do it all, but still quite neat if a team of a few were able to take it on.

Tree cover and other things are a bit of an oddity. It's almost like different trees species or height affect it as well. I've had my GPS is thick cover, where I could barely see the sky, but still have lock on several sats. Other times, open wood might bring me down to a max of 3 or 4, and have more jumping. But here I sit in my lazyboy after downloading a pocket query to my gps, and I have 5 sat feeds coming to me on the ground floor of a 2 story house... go figure. 2 other things I've noticed as a newbie... coords can be off for a lot of caches... don't just stop walking once your gps says you're there. But if I find a cache and it's more than 25 or 30 feet away from the published coords, I'll note that in my logs. Then if other people do the same, and 10 people log a cache saying it's off by .005 to the north, then maybe the owner will publish new numbers for everyone. The other thing I've noticed, is once I got a GPS, I placed 2 caches in heavily wooded areas, and both of them have gotten DNF's that the loggers both mentioned jumpy GPS coords. So sometimes having too good of a gps may be a bad thing, and you may be unknowingly excluding some other hunters from the party. But I figure that's their problem

Welcome aboard vawlk... I too am a newbie, and I found the same thing with my cheap, old GPS... any trees or anything would cause it to jump like crazy... great for exercise, but not good for caching . You can find countless threads out here with different people liking different GPS's. But a few things stand out... newer is typically better. And some of the more expensive ones can easily be many times more accurate than a cheap one. I too "treasure hunt" with my 3 year old. And while she liked it when the GPS worked, she didn't really like tromping around in circles for an hour. So in order to keep a special father/daughter activity going strong, I bought a better GPS (GPSMAP 60c) for about $250 on ebay. It made all the difference in the world... was able to snag several caches quickly this weekend. And she was thrilled with her new "toys".

Now I understand why my first GPS was so cheap on Ebay. I started GC a month ago, and bought a Garmin GPS 38 on ebay. It's accuracy stops at about the county level Since no one has listed one at all here, it must be rather rare, and/or worthless. Quickly replaced with a Garmin GPSMAP 60C and loving it. So please jot me down for a Garmin GPS 38 and a GPSMAP 60C. Thanks for spending the time collecting this data... more data is always a good thing.

I like the easy theme of music, and the primary trade item are usable CD's... bring some music you don't listen to anymore, and take someone else's old stuff. I was thinking about doing a toolbox cache... I have an old metal tool box thatI have no need for... and was going to place it and ask that only tools be left (of course kids play tools are ok)

The P38 is a great little thing... even though my time in the army was well into the MRE days and the P38's weren't used, they were still always around. I've used them as box openers, screwdrivers and other things. While they can be sharp, I don't think it'd be too dangerous unless a parent just let a kid run wild with one. I used to wear one on my dog tags, and many other soldiers did as well, and I don't remember hearing about any accidents. If you want to do a take on it's modern cousin, buy some MRE's and put one piece in each cache... some things are small, some larger... but everything has very long if not infinite shelf life at room temperature. Last I saw they were $8-$12 each, and each one would have at least 6 maybe 8 trade worthy items.. (I love those tiny hot sauce bottles) They may have changed, but as I recall the MRE's had various combinations of the following: An entre' pouch industrial strength saltines peanut butter pouch cocoa pouch instant coffee and fixins gum hot sauce emergency toilet paper (frighteningly small) wet naps Yes, I understand that it's food, and that's normally a bad thing, but this stuff is sealed tight, unless the package is damaged, no animal is going to smell it or be that hungry for it... at least no more so that the leftover oils and smells on our own hands that end up on a cache after snacking while walking to a cache or something. towards the tail end of my service, the army added bread... yes... near infinite shelf life mini-loafs. But they were pretty good. And the real nice thing was the water heaters... these little guys were a pouch of some metal flake material... put in about 1/2 cup of water, and it heats up fast... and for some of those entre pouches, a little heat goes a long way taste-wise. I have a couple old ones laying around, but getting some more MRE's is on my list for the next time I'm at the surplus store. Some of the items would be excellent swag.

Not to mention the possible locations... how incredibly cool would it be to have an extra large geocache... Say something along the size of an abandoned Iraqi tank? And some bomb/missle craters would allow for burying of some large caches w/o ever touching a shovel. On the contrary, there probably isn't a worst place in the world to place an odd looking container near a road or a path. Being muggled is one thing... being presumed to be an IED and demolished is another.

Home Depot! They always have stacks of their orange buckets around, and in one or 2 of those areas, they usually have lids... Not a promise that it will fit other 5 gallon buckets... btu for less than $10 you can buy both... then spend $20 on camo materials to hide a bright orange bucket!