NinjaCacher!

Result of my trip, 75 finds including 73 FTF's in 12 hours walk over 25km. Call me mad... But of course, my number of finds was topped by agrajag2007 and Dr.Dewdrop on the following day who managed to find 104 in 15 hours (and of course claiming most of the FTF's that remained after the first day). Not a bad effort, well done! Rain wasn't too bad... it was raining quite heavily 4 times but each time only very short, so could find protection under some trees or bushes. My main problem were my feet getting shredded into pieces due to shoes letting water in and feet getting wet already within the first half hour or so... Don't worry, cachers are a friendly bunch and I wasn't going to leave it there... The only other cacher I bumped into on that day... slightly disappointed, come on people, 110 FTF's up for grabs and nobody taking the day off?

any other mad cachers out around chesham today? give me a call, [number edited out ] - we could join forces

Hi and welcome - always good to see a new cacher in the area. Now off for your first non-virtual.. there are heaps of them in central London, just pick one to start that doesn't have too many stars... happy caching

I just noticed the new UK subdivision when looking at my "unfound caches around London" PQ and came here to see any announcement about it. I already see some problems.. eg. GC1EBZB is listed as Southeast of England, whereas GC1EDCR is listed as East of England. Surely the latter is more south/east, but which one is right? Where are the imaginary borders between the listed parts of the UK? Surely some note to all UK cachers (not just those reading the forum), defining which areas should be in "Southeast", "Southwest", "East", "West", "East Midlands", "West Midlands" etc., would be good... otherwise I see a lot of confusion coming up.

Congratulations to GOLDPOT for 1000 finds!! London's favourite royal park gardener has logged his 1000th find quietly on the Isles of Scilly (GC1AC1) on Easter Monday without telling anyone - but appropriate celebrations will be held at the London event tonight! (I heard all drinks are on him )

Hmm personally I don't think that's an ideal solution. It's ok in relatively "dense" cache areas, but sometimes when travelling you get into areas with almost no caches and then you should be able to zoom out beyond 100 miles and still get results. Try finding a cache in India, just as an example. I know there are other options to find caches (google earth, find by country etc.) but I think the google maps are just the quickest and easiest way to get an overview of what's around (and google earth may not be available while travelling...) I see there needs to be some limit to the number of caches displayed in a dense area (which is currently set to 500 i think), but I don't see the point in stopping to display caches completely after some zoom level (for dense areas people could still zoom out beyond the cache limit). I didn't actually mind the blue patches too much as long as they are not kicking in too early (10 was much too early imo - 25 or better 50 ok, or something like from 200 total caches on the map might have worked...) and as long as they would be updated with changes in the selected caches (which I assume is technically difficult as this is done in the browser whereas the "patches" are generated on the server). But then the maximum distance shouldn't be limited, because we have the patches or the number of caches limit that will at some point avoid loading too much. Anyway just another twopence opinion (sorry we don't have cents over here ).

My favourite icons of the coins that I own: And a few more that I've moved/discovered:

That's where my GPS watch comes into play Look for Garmin Forerunner 205 (mine is the 305 but you don't need that unless you want it to monitor your heart rate while caching ). It's basically a sports watch that uses GPS to track speed/distance. It also has very basic features for caching, ie. show distance/direction to a waypoint and plot your path - no maps though and only holds 50 waypoints. But good enough for some undercover caching - haven't been to Russia but found my first >200 caches with it ... Not sure if they can be considered as (relatively) cheap yet.. price should go down though as there's a new version coming out soon.

Some of my own pictures... Perhaps not best pictures but I love the views from our mountains back home in chocolate-land From GC12XQ1 - about 4000 feet above the lake From GC16935 Oh and a nice panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco (from GCA7F2 - I did get a chance to go back and log a find about 8 months later ) And you do get some nice scenic views in Japan (GCYWJ8) Oh and a funny one from Japan (GCNW1V) - Lost in Translation?

Absolutely!

Caching in London, you got to have all your stealth techniques ready... As I do most caches here by bicycle, the bike comes in quite handy - I just lean it against what I want to take a closer look at and start "fixing" something on the bike - checking the back wheel, adjusting the brakes etc. If that wasn't the right spot and the same muggles are still around, a short test ride and back for more "fixing" will do... works most of the time I even managed to confuse another cacher who was waiting for me to move away to be able to replace the cache... Otherwise, tactics include taking pictures of something, talking to myself on the phone, pretending to do anything "official" (high visibility jacket etc. helps), obviously fastening shoe laces etc, sometimes just pretending to be confused or drunk works too. And if all fails and somebody occupies your spot and doesn't move away, the best solution is usually just to tell them what you're doing...

This one works well to calculate the distance between two points, convert different coords formats etc.

24 minutes: here Basically, by setting them up here. You need to be premium member to be able to do that. However, I had trouble with this in the last couple months, a large part of the "published" notifications didn't get to my mailbox. There's a series of about 40 caches in my notification range placed within the last 2 months, and I only got notifications for 3 of them. Not sure what is going on there or where the issue is - still hoping that it magically starts working again sometime...

Anybody else still having trouble with notifications? For the last 2-3 months, I've been getting occasional notifications but a part doesn't seem to get through. For example cache GC18NEW was published today within 10.9km from home (my notification for traditional caches is set up to 35 km), but no notification. I do get quite a bunch of archived/unarchived etc. notifications which I also subscribe to, but just missing many published notifications. Particularly I notice it in a series of caches 10-20km from here - there were about 40 caches placed with the name "WTF: something" within the last two months but I only got notifications for 3 of them! Makes me think maybe it's something about the "WTF" in the name. For the record, I use gmail, also checked spam folders etc. and don't have trouble receiving any other mail. Also tried several times deleting the notifications and setting them up again, with no success. So I'm really wondering what is happening to these notifications... Anybody else got similar problems? Any references to known issues with this?

Nice. What circumstances are qualifying?

not exaclty within the subject, but in the same area... why do we need to set up notifications for each cache type? wouldn't it be much easier if there were a notification setup for "ALL" cache types? ok some people may prefer different notifications for different cache types, so i don't mind the option to chose individual notifications - but for me it would just be easier to set ONE notification for all types. what do others think? for the shortened mail feature, with wap link - i also think that would be a nice thing to have. coords or not - i assume they wouldn't put coors in (because of obvious reasons), which would be ok for me (even though i'm also somebody who sometimes starts a search before reading the cache page). cheers from UK

Hmmmm.. looks like I'm about 10 months too late for this one So what about v3?

My current top 3: - 2007 Hong Kong Geocoin two-tone (love the design, the size, the gold/silver finish...) - Suncatcher Geocoin warm (love the warm translucent colors) - Double Dragon Geocoin two-tone (great dragons, gold/silver finish again...) (only one of these 3 I actually own myself... still looking for the other 2)

I think it's alien activity. They are coming.

That only seems to work if you have loaded a map that supports that, ie. City Navigator. I've got MetroGuide and it doesn't allow you to do it. Quite annoying actually, I thought it would allow it. (obviously the base map doesn't either..)

i made a reservation too. how much will shipping be outside US?

Or use the converter on this website. If you want to know the difference, it's actually quite simple: (1) is Degrees Minutes: N35 17.166 (so you have 17.166 minutes) (2) is Degrees Minutes Seconds: N35 17'09.86 (you have 17 minutes and 9.86 seconds) As a minute has 60 seconds, you can divide the seconds of (2) by 60 (9.86/60) to get the decimal part of (1): ie. 9.86 / 60 = 0.164 -> 17'09.86 = 17.164 Or the other way round, multiply the decimals by 60: ie. 0.166 * 60 = 9.96 --> 17.166 = 17'09.96 So the two things are almost the same... Edit: Btw the third format also used on google etc. is only degrees with decimals. One degree has 60 minutes, so in the same way you can convert 35 17.166 into 35.2861 by dividing 17.166 by 60 ...

I'd say use EasyGPS as a caching "beginner" - as it's name suggests, it's easy, simple and straightforward - probably much easier to use than GSAK. It's good enough to upload the coords to your GPSr, and I think it's free. Once you want more than just that, become a premium member, start using Pocket Queries - and get GSAK to find out about the huge number of other things you can do with it! Happy caching!

Another option instead of PDA is if your cellphone supports HTML pages, you can export cache pages from GSAK to html and copy them to your phone by USB. The exported html pages contain logs and hints, however if the cache page includes images, they are not stored with the exported html - you would have to connect your phone to the web to see the images. Works out fine for me, I've done most of my caches that way.

I'm using Garmin ForeRunner 305 - basically a sports watch that comes with some very basic navigation features. No maps, no fancy colours etc. just 100 waypoints without even the cache name (just waypoint code), and up to about 4 hours battery power. Let's go lowtech! I actually found out about geocaching because I bought this for running and was looking for some software to upload running routes and navigation points to the unit. It's very basic but has done the job for my first 222 caches (in 5 countries). But now I think it's about time to upgrade... Edit: just ordered a brand new Garmin GPSmap 60CSx which should get here in a couple days <-- ForeRunner in action... this is the picture to claim this virtual cache in Japan