oobnuker

This is ridiculous... "Hi sir, I realize that you don't have the means to live anywhere but in a tent in the woods, and may or may not have eaten today, but I'd like to very slightly add to your troubles by asking you to move your camp 528 feet east of here so that we can play our GAME. You see, we take our $500 GPS receivers around in our free time and search for trinkets in little containers, hidden in the woods. Half the time we don't even take the trinkets, we do it just for fun!" "Sir, do you remember fun?"

This page has a lot more information in "plainer English". http://www.pnt.gov/interference/lightsquared/

IN RUSSIA, GLONASS FINDS YOU!

I ran out last evening to go to Walgreens to pick up a prescription or two. Our youngest son was being a monster as he was over tired but just wouldn't admit it - he's almost 16 months. So I commandeered one of my older sons to come along for the ride with the baby so that I could leave them in the car and run in to the store without having to lug the inevitably sleeping baby in... We got done with that and found that we had a half an hour to wait before picking up one of my daughters from school and I didn't want to sit around in the car so I figured, "let's go grab a cache". My older son is generally always up for an adventure, and since I have become interested in geocaching, I have basically obsessed about it so I knew there was one within a mile of the school that was supposed to be not too tough but not quick enough for me to have already grabbed on my way home from work. We get to the parking spot and I figure I'd send my boy in to grab it, but looking at the satellite image on my phone, he decided that it was too far into the woods (about 250') and he didn't want to go it alone. I of course didn't want to leave them in the car while I went in - so the solution was to grab sleeping cranky-pants, carrying him like a football, and head off into the woods. He naturally woke up but was excited to be free from the bonds of his car seat and out of the house. So off we went a couple hundred feet into the woods from a little known industrial cul-de-sac to find his 15th cache and my 50th! The cache was a nice big ammo can embedded in a fallen tree stump, covered in sticks. It was great, chilly, impromptu fun in a time period that we would have otherwise just sat in the car tapping away at our phones... Instead of sitting on my butt eating greasy food from the cafeteria at work, I run out at lunch time and try and grab a cache or two - sometimes resulting in mile's walk or more. I end up grabbing a salad from the little kiosk by the parking garage instead of the cafeteria food. My point is - geocaching is fun and has positively influenced my life, and that has trickled down to my children's lives as well. (Long story short, I'd rather lug the sleeping baby into the woods to grab a geocache then take the sleeping baby into Walgreens to pick up a prescription - hahahaha!)

Username: Oobnuker Colors: Black, Orange Items: Borderlands-esque Robot Other: Borderlands is a game if you didn't already know that. Thanks for the offer! I'm excited to see what you come up with and hope you have fun doing it!

The iPhone 4and 4s have a great GPS. The Groundspeak Official app is well worth the $9.99 in the app store. It is by far the easiest one to use in my opinion. If you want just a GPS "dashboard" like app, then I would suggest MotionX GPS in the app store. It might be $2 or $3 but works just like the "dashboard" on many handheld GPS units so it includes a compass and heading, you can program waypoints into it, mark waypoints, etc. If you are going to a general GPS orientation class then this might be good as it will be similar to the screen that GPS users will be looking at when going after a cache. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motionx-gps/id299949744?mt=8 Hope this helps and have fun! Although I created my account 5+ years ago, I only started caching in the beginning of December '11 and I'm totally hooked!

Borax is a good "natural" remedy. It can usually be found for cheap in the laundry detergent aisle at the grocery store. Borax laid down on the carpet for 24 hours then vacuumed up seems to kill the eggs. I'm not sure what you'd use as a natural remedy to kill the current live ones though, but Borax works like a charm.

The Geopt.org site itself seems to have a lot of geocaching information on it but is in Portuguese or something?

This looks like a neat tool. The Geopt.org site looks really cool - I wish we had something like that in English...

I believe you're referring to the Google Maps Navigation. Since Android is a Google product, of course they'll support this feature. However, Google doesn't want its competitors to have this feature. This is why the iPhone, Windows Phone, etc. will never get Google Maps Navigation, and therefore it can not be part of the Geocaching app for iPhone. Huh? Google maps has been on the iPhone since day one. It's not the best navigation program by a long shot but it's there and included with the phone... This would be a great aid in my opinion. I try and grab quick park and grab caches on my way to and from work all the time and would love to be able to navigate via the app. As it is right now, I basically have to wing it as the Groundspeak app only shows an "as the crow flies" pointer...

On my iPhone I usually do a search for the cache(s) that I want to load up and then with each one I add to it to a "Saved List". You have the option of creating a new list when you select "Add to Saved List", so you can create one for "Friday" and then repeat your search for each cache and simply add it to the the "Friday" list. Not sure what else you can do.

Try this: http://www.gpsfaqs.org/faqs/magellan/explorist/explorist500/geocaching.html

Egads. That guy was a hardcore Nuvi car gps Geocacher, wasn't he? Last updated December, 2008. I'll bet he finally threw in the towel, and bought a handheld. That Macro for loading the cache data works excellent, I do in fact know a somewhat casual Geocacher who has about 500 finds walking around with a Nuvi "until the numbers line up", so to speak. And has hidden 5 or 6. Personally, I find the "compass" (it's not really a compass) or navigation screen of a handheld (or even a smartphone app) an essential element of finding the cache. But you certainly can do it without one. I used his process to load a bunch of geocaches in my old Garmin 200w - it works great! Considering that the iPhone app does not give you turn by turn directions to the cache, the combination of the Nuvi with the iPhone (or the GPSrs that I have) works perfectly. Nuvi gets me close without trying to drive "as the crow flies" - which doesn't work very well - and the other devices get me right to the spot.

Check out this site: http://geocaching.totaltechworld.com/ It is dedicated to geocaching with a Nuvi. It's going to be a bit of a battle and it is kinda technical - so not sure how deep you want to get into it with the Nuvi alone... It's not meant for pedestrian travel despite the "feature". Without going into all the technical details on that page, you may find the information on http://geocaching.totaltechworld.com/finding.html particularly helpful. It shows a hidden feature of the Nuvis that should help in finding your target.

I recently brought my kids out to a cache that I had found a few weeks ago. It was a magnetic nano and when I found it the log was all mush and packed in the container. The previous logs had indicated the same. I happened to have a new nano log all rolled up in my cache-bag and a new nano cache. I replaced the log and took the o-ring from my nano and replaced the missing one. My nano ended up in a nice spot sheltered from the elements so missing it's o-ring wouldn't really foul it up at all. I posted a log note indicating what I had done and that I had the original log if the owner wanted it - despite it being wet mush. He wrote back and was very thankful for my effort and told me to just toss the log. He said that he had been laid up for a while after having had foot surgery and didn't have a chance to maintain the cache lately. Our trip out there ended up with a nice new log with 5 new entries on it and a new o-ring so the log doesn't deteriorate again...

If I search through my email history, I see the original Groundspeak account validation email dated 6/16/06 – but I cannot for the life of me remember the context in which I joined the site… In the beginning of December 2011, I had been working at a new job for just over a month and found the history of the building that I worked in fascinating. I was using the Internet to do some research on the building and the architect that had designed it nearly a hundred years ago when I stumbled on a site dedicated to exploring all sorts of obscure things to do in CT. On that site, I discovered a National Historic Registry site called “Hospital Rock” that had been built some 200 years ago as a small-pox hospital. The story of the rock intrigued me and I set out on a mission to find it. Unfortunately, the exact location of Hospital Rock is a closely guarded secret as the powers that be do not want it defaced or damaged in any way – which is completely understandable. A few more minutes of research trying to find the location of Hospital Rock led me to the fact that someone had setup a Premium Only cache on the site. I vaguely remembered having had a Geocaching.com account and set about restoring it. I then paid my fees for the Premium Membership and voila! I now had the coordinates for Hospital Rock… Interestingly enough, I still have not found it! In fact, my first cache was found completely off-handedly. I was waiting in line at our local cable company and wondered if there were any caches around. I loaded up the app on my iphone and found one of the TTMTD series caches was a mile away. My step daughter and I stopped for some coffee and subsequently found our first cache! A camouflaged film can hanging from a tree in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot… As boring as it sounds it really started a fire! Fast forward a month and I have now purchased a dedicated GPSr – a Magellan Explorist GC – and have been given a Garmin Etrex Legend CX. I’ve got all of my kids hooked on it and now find myself jealous of some of their finds… I’m stuck at work all day and often only have time for quick park and grabs. Yesterday a bunch of my kids went on a four hour hike through the state forest and found three caches! I am so happy about this new hobby/sport/game!

My goal for 2012 has already been fulfilled! I started geocaching a month ago and have been going full steam ahead ever since. I wanted to introduce my kids to geocaching so for Christmas I stopped off at REI and picked up a bunch of official geocache material - nano-caches, micro caches, hidden rocks, etc. and gave it to them as a group gift. As of yesterday, every single one of my kids has gone on a geocache hunt and found at least one cache. Some of them have found 4 or 5 now! They have introduced at least one friend and one boyfriend as well. In fact, yesterday, while I ran out to do some errands, a group of my kids went off hiking in the State Forest across the street from our house for FOUR HOURS. They ended up finding three caches - two of which were 2/3.5's with some pretty difficult terrain. I texted them a couple of hours in and asked how they were doing and got a nice pic of an ammo can back! Proud Father!

I created my account here several years ago when I had first heard about it but never actually went out and found a cache. At the time, GPS equipment was prohibitively expensive and my phone didn't have one. I desperately wanted a GPS and managed to cobble a solution together using an old PDA, a compact flash GPS receiver, an external magnetic antenna, and a copy of TomTom - all for around $100 (used). This was about 5 or 6 years ago. I actually reacquainted myself with GeoCaching a few weeks ago after doing some research on the internet about interesting historical sites in CT. One of the sites is a protected spot that the town does not want to publish the location to for fear that it will be defaced, etc. I was so curious that after digging around on the 'net for a while, I found that someone had placed a geocache at the site. The cache was premium-only and hence my premium membership was born... I still haven't found that particular cache - haven't even looked for it. Long story short - I revisited geocaching after never really having started after 5 years. I got my paid membership and I downloaded the app. I quickly set out with a "find nearby caches" attitude and settled on the TTMTD series. "Time To Make The Donuts" which, as you can imagine is a series of film canisters hidden near Dunkin Donuts shops across CT. My first find was with one of my kids one day. My car's GPS brought us within 50' or so and we hopped out and began searching with the iPhone app. Within about 5-10 minutes we found the cache hanging in a tree. Despite the fact that our first cache was a - now I have learned, dreaded - film canister, roadside, park and grab, we were both extremely excited. My daughter was curious about it and I told her everything I knew. A few days later, while shopping somewhere else, I found another TTMTD cache with a couple of my other kids (I have a lot of kids). These guys were out there with headlamps, scrabbling over stone walls, searching nooks and crannies for a FILM CANISTER. The horror! I know I am getting into this late - like 10 or 11 years late. But I have to say, if it weren't for these two film canister, park and grab, stealth required, coffee shop parking lot geocaches, I might not have ever gotten back into it. Sure, I may have eventually trekked through the woods to find that old historic site and maybe THAT would have started the fever, but who knows, and who knows WHEN I would have been able to do that. What does this have to do with "0 finds" placing caches? After finding a handful of caches - all micros and nanos that were easily accessible, I wanted to place one of my own. My kids are DYING to place them. I have now at LEAST 4 new geocachers ready to go as soon as I say the word. I went out last weekend, after reading up on how to average coordinates, and the pitfalls of using an iPhone to place caches, etc. and decided to go for it anyway. I placed my cache. I used my phone to get some coordinates, I used the GPS in the car as I was able to literally park next to my hiding spot, and I used Google Earth to all ensure that my original coordinates were good. I listed it and it was approved within 48 hours. FTF was 5:00am the next day by someone who had found thousands of caches before. An hour later, another person had found it. My enthusiasm for this game has just tripled. I am getting my kids geocache starter kits for Christmas. I actually reached out to the two people who had found the cache and asked them politely if the coordinates were OK as this was my first hide. They both came back and said they were spot on or within 10'. So - I've written a book here... If it weren't for the so-called lame park and grab film canister caches that are all over the world, this 9-find cacher wouldn't have been able to place his first cache. I think I did OK for myself. People should stop being hung up on the numbers. The caches are only as good as the cachers. I'm guessing that a lot of the folks out there who are complaining about this phenomenon are people who have been doing it for a long time and who may have forgotten how exciting it is to find your first cache. If we do our research, read the logs, etc. then we can make our own decisions about what caches to go for or not. Caches dropped by fly-by-nighters that are unmaintained will weed themselves out eventually. Perhaps a better idea than to restrict people from hiding caches until X finds or Y days/months/years would be to have a window of time in which a cache owner must respond to a NM or NA log entry. If that window is exceeded then the reviewer could be notified and the cache archived administratively. This way, people who actually care, despite the number of caches they have or the length of time they have been in the game, can respond and take care of the problem. People who don't care, drop crappy caches, are out of the game, etc. will never miss their archived caches and the problem would resolve itself. And once I go after a "real" cache, hidden deep in the woods, with a giant container full of goodies to trade, I'm sure my enthusiasm will triple again! And don't fear, I will not let my kids place any caches without complete supervision - I want them to do it right. I want them to feel the excitement of knowing that someone found THEIR cache. I want to keep it fun for them so that those who choose to stick with it are able to cache responsibly and have a great time. I hope Santa brings me a GPSr for Christmas...if he doesn't I'm going to have to go buy one myself. I already know the limitations of my phone - and the stigma attached to using it thanks to these forums. I WANT to do it right. That's the difference. 0 finds. 10,000 finds. Whatever.