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I have an interesting plan for a new hide. I need to incorporate some sort of plaque into the cache placement. Is there any body out there that would have some sort of idea on how to create one? I have considered getting small peices of marble and trying to use a dremel / rotary tool to engrave it,... this however could become expensive very quickly as I don't even have a dremel. The plaque would need to fit the following critera in the end. - Nice finish, or the ability to hold paint to apply finish - Longevity in the outdoors, aging is no problem but I don't want it to be destroyed by moisture or cold (may rule out clay, don't know) - Not easily cracked or chipped - Somewhere around 4 inch diamter, or 4 x 4 square.... not set on these dimensions but would like it to be near that size. Cannot be made of cement as the place it will be mounted that we are creating is made out of that and it would not look all that thrilling. Ideas anyone?

I was heading out with a friend today. Just after we put the first cache away, a Forest Service truck drove up. We ended up talking to this 24-year veteran of the Forest Service for more than an hour. She had never heard about Geocaching. She actually found a cache one time (DeCon container), but it did not have a log inside it, or any other information about it being a Geocache (only a whistle and one other thing), so it ended up in the trash. As we explained Geocaching, she was very open to the sport and thought her own children would like it. However, one thing that surprised me was when she said that even with a big label on a cache container, it wouldn't have meant anything. In this area they have to contend with a lot of trash left by illegal aliens, so without knowing about the game, even a well-marked ammo can might have ended up in the back of the truck to be tossed out. Does it surprise you that someone who works for the Forest Service has never heard about Geocaching? How would you proceed so the local Forest Service personnel become aware of our sport?

http://www.skype.com/ i find this good free inter net phone my user is craigmawdesley

Look for clues on the page. For example, if there's a mention of "the key". Some ciphers use a key word. But the puzzle may be unique, where the challenge is to figure out "where to start". Look at the Difficulty rating. If it's 3.5 or higher, prepare to attack this one with your game face on. You may first try easier puzzle caches, especially puzzles by the same Cache Owner. Some ciphers are more common for Geocache puzzles. Look for nearby "Puzzle Cache" Events or even "Geocaching 101" or meet & greet Events. If you can talk to the CO or others at an Event about where you're stuck, they may help. Good luck!

It seems to, which is likely historic. (But that's great .) There's been more caches published since my visit, so you should be able to outdo my finds. Including ALs about 23 more since I was there. So for a small place, a lot of caches. Tempted to return to find the new ones. There's a challenge cache there to log, if you find all the caches on the island. I logged it, as at the time, I found all the caches. There's a couple of ALs too, which is interesting on an island without proper mobile coverage. I didn't have those to do then. I think you find the answers and go somewhere that has wifi to log them. Endeavour3 is a local cacher, and very helpful. He tends to put on meet and greets when he knows cachers are visiting. He had a CITO for my visit, and we walked along Kingston foreshore picking up rubbish, and me logging any caches I passed. There was an Earth cache (his) and after we visited it and he gave me a talk on it, he said now you can log. There's a wide variety of caches there. Even a small power-trail. The island is 34.6 km². We have bigger farms than that in Australia.

Hm. Reviewers being reviewers. Not all reviewers are the same. Not the CHS. How many times have we been through this whole "CHS" thing? Why are "experienced cachers" "required" to respond to the email? That's new. We know that caches that have been pinged by the algorithm are flagged for reviewers (or rather, if they're below the score threshold, to be specific, as far as I know, on top of numerous other factors available to reviewers' judgmental scans). That's it. The reviewer is the one that acts after that. That's it. That's all. If your reviewers are strict on caches with low score - talk to them.

If you were a muggle (I know it may be hard to think in these terms), and your friend, who happened to be a geocacher, decided to teach you the game, what would you think? Not knowing what you know today, would you believe him to be crazy; would you regard him as an inspiration; would you disregard him?

I was wondering what others use to clean their precious Garmin 60cs/60c screens. I've been using a little Windex, or a little soap and water. To wipe it dry I have a small "silk?" sunglasses bag. I think this is safe. I don't have a screen protector on so the actual screen gets dirty and smudged. What do you use to clean and wipe? (YOUR SCREEN !)

I've looked at ever major store in my area for those little tiny baggies people use for micro caches. Where can I get them????!!!

One of my least enjoyable days was the day I decided to find 100 caches in a day on a power trail. 80ish of the finds on the trail plus a few others in the area and I did it solo. Talk about miserable, I was so exhausted getting in and out of the car. Yes I parked next to the cache but after 100 times it adds up. Even putting on the seat belt was a an effort. No plans of ever doing that again.

I wouldn't consider travelling anywhere at present, unless it was for an important reason, such as medical. Europe is having a surge in Covid. Fine to talk about future trips in years to come, but to talk about a trip this year appears to be living in an alternative universe, where there is no Covid. As for myself, I don't know when I will be able to travel overseas next (our borders are closed); maybe not even next year, unless the few remaining Covid caches in Australia (I think about 15 new cases today) can be eradicated and we can make a bubble with NZ and perhaps some Pacific Islands. Even some state borders are closed to cross border visits. My last new country was PNG in February.

Hello Everyone!! I am the administrator of a new site called GPS Gab. I started this site because I enjoy GPS Technology and am fascinated with it's funtionality. I have live news feeds from the technology sector and update the site with GPS news almost daily. I also am buiilding an extensive list of links and quite possibly may have GPS update software on the site at some point. We have a nice big forum with a lot of nice new topics to post in also! So, stop by and say hello and if you have any comments, gripes, or problems, email me at admin@gpsgab.com Please Visit http://www.gpsgab.com Happy Hunting! Mike Admin for GPSGab.com

Hi, A fact is that some useful features were working and have just disapeared. I may have missed it, but I did not read any answer about the filter of the Personal Notes... For example with this link I was able to search all mysteries having "not modified" coordinates and that does not have a PN : https://www.geocaching.com/play/results?sw=1&ct=8&hf=1&ho=1&cc=0&nfb=smashcfr This has just been deactivated... Why, as it worked ? And why this does not have been repaired, as this should be very easy if you use GIT... As I already said, it's great to try to produce new things, this can be very positive... But not when each time useful functionnalities disapear (I wrote here about PN, but I'd be able to talk about many more...). So please, any news about those PN ? This should be very easy to put it back...

Got a Dell Inspirion 1150 with windows XP home for Christmas. I bought the necessary items to use it with my Good Ol Garmin GPS III+ . First off why does no one make a USB GPS cable! How many Laptops these days still have serial ports! Maybe there is one but I jut missed it! I bought a combination power / data GPS cable on ebay for $15, its not a Garmin brand, says its made by “Gibson” I also bought a serial to USB adapter, which came with a driver disk. I have had Mapsource Topo for a while and have had no problems with it on my home computer. (got a great deal on it, knew I would have a laptop eventually) Connects with the Gamin supplied cable just fine to the desktop PC. Put it all together, installed mapsource and the drivers for the adapter. The computer keeps giving me errors that the GPS is not connected! I have tried manually selecting COM1-COM4, tried both USB ports and still get the same thing. I have also tried it with EasyGPS with the same results. I tried using my old Garmin Brand cable with the laptop to rule out the off brand cable causing the problem. I also tried the off brand GPS cable on the desktop computer and it worked fine. A friend of mine has the same set up on his newer Dell laptop with XP and mapsource metroguide as well as Easy GPS. He looked at it and all my settings and could find nothing wrong. Only difference on his is that he has a different brand of adapter and a Garmin brand DC/Data cable. For now the thinking is that the USB / Serial Adapter is bad. Going to try his adapter on my computer later today to see. Just wondering if anyone has any other ideas on things to check?

1) I had read about geocaching way back when it started. I have always loved maps and compass, and I knew about GPS. Years later, my wife worked food service as a kitchen manager. One day, she brought home a catalog from a local food service company, and told me I have 100,000+ points that I could spend on anything I wanted. They had a Garmin eTrex, the original eTrex for 98,000 points, so I ordered it. Loaded the coords for a local cache, and went and found it. Then, it sat for over a year, before I found another cache. 2) I did it for a number of reasons. First and foremost in my mind, it was a cool use of the technology. A bit of adventure, getting out and about. Something I could do with the kids, then the grandkids. 3) I haven't gone geocaching in a couple of years. Basically, all the remaining local caches are (IMO) lame. I don't have as much time to do this, and I do other GPS based activities. I will get back into it when I retire. (I'm right on the brink of starting to count down the months, instead of the years. Got 33 months left.) Other have mentioned that Geocaching is a hobby, not a game. To me, it is a bit of both. Games need to have rules, so I make up my own rules. Challenges actually. I did a Jasmer challenge. I want to find a cache in each degree (0-359) using my home as a base. I want to find cache in each 5 mile band away from my house out to 350 miles. I will do GeoTours. These are the games/challenges I set for myself. You talk about the Gamification of the Outdoors. I'm assuming that this is about games played in real world locations, and how technology is allowing a more diverse set of location based games. Pre-GPS, this would include things like Orienteering and Letterboxing. With GPS, we got Geocaching. With Smartphones, our options expanded to include 'games' such as Pokemon GO, Ingress, Pikmin Bloom, and others. If you change the title to Gamification of Location, you could include some console based games, games that required multiple people to be in the same location (indoors or outdoors) in order to do certain things. (Anyone remember the cables required to link handheld consoles together, before wireless.)

Thank you for the reply. I have asked that question to the head office and got no reply yet. I wanted to install the app on my phone but didn't know if there was a cost to do so. All the feed back talk is about how it cost so much to use your phone with the app. I'm not real Tec'y ,so I need help with it all. Thank You Again

I was thinking it would be kind of cool to talk to other cachers and I was just wondering if any Vancouver Island Cachers would like to talk on msn? If so Please post your email address so everyone can add you. Ours is thecacheraiders@hotmail.com Drive It Like Ya Stole It! Zoom Zooom Zoooom!!!!!!!!!!!

I was looking for information to do a cache with, and did this search on yahoo... You'll notice that two of the first four results are links to gc cache pages. I think that's a sign that I must now do this cache.

Hi all, A couple of geocaching video creators from New Zealand recently shared an interesting talk about the events leading up to Selective Availability being disabled. I thought it was really interesting and wanted to share it here. From the video description: "This Cache Walk is a talk by Jason Kim from the National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing, Washington, D.C. He talks about turning off the Selected Availability (SA) feature in 2000 which increased the GPS accuracy to the public allowing the game of geocaching to begin." I hope you enjoy this.

It would be nice if someone from geocaching HQ would read this post and say something. Even, "no thank you, we're happy with the way this is" though I'd prefer "thanks for the feedback, that's an interesting idea and we'll talk about it". I think it's a great idea as a software engineer, and helpful to integrate labs into the mainline game. Anyone from HQ listening? Hello?

Why would they need to hide geocaches to battleship the finals? They could just use the saturation checker without actually submitting any caches for review. This is not the first time this topic has come up. Here is one of Keystone's replies to one of the earlier threads: So, suppose I tell you that your proposed location is 110m northwest of the final coordinates for "Cacher Conundrum," a five-star puzzle cache that only four people have ever solved and logged in the past three years. Armed with that intelligence, you track down the container and sign the log at the same time when you move your cache to a spot that's 162m away. What do I get for being helpful? A flaming email from the CO of "Cacher Conundrum," who also posts to three Facebook groups, and files a complaint with Geocaching HQ that I gave away secret information and ruined the puzzle cache. Having had that happen to us enough times, reviewers nowadays are constrained to be less forthcoming with details. Depending on your reviewer, you may get a hint, like "you are less than 161m from "Cacher Conundrum," GCABCDE, or you may get a hint that you should strongly consider moving to the southeast, or you may not get any guidance at all. So, that's how come. In a world where people hack lab caches and share the final coordinates of puzzle caches in Facebook groups, the inevitable outcome of such a feature would be to spoil every puzzle cache, multicache and Wherigo cache, plus a fair percentage of letterbox hybrid caches. There are people who like placing and finding these cache types. Geocaching.com has chosen not to alienate them by ruining the ability to keep the actual locations a secret. "But all I need is a distance and direction," you might say. So, the cheater simply enters enough coordinates into the planner tool to permit them to hone in on the actual location through triangulation. Think that can't happen? Talk to the travel bug stalkers who watch for drops of trackables in unpublished caches so they can figure out the locations and log a pre-publication "FTF." Talk to the group of cachers who hid traditionals in every conceivable spot within two miles of a 5-star puzzle, knowing they'd eventually "battleship" their way to a hit, and then they could do a scorched earth hunt within that area. I foiled them by publishing their cache even though it was 200 feet away from the puzzle final. Reviewers are smart humans*, you see, and that is better than an automated system. *Many reviewers are dogs.

Interview between Cape Talk presenter Kieno Kammies and Prof Charles Merry of University of Cape Town on Cape Talk radio (567 AM) in South Africa, May 3 2001 at 1330 GMT+2. www.capetalk.co.za. Duration is 7 minutes 32 seconds. Listen now (mp3). http://www.geocaching.com/media/CapeTalk.mp3 ------------------ Peter Scholtz www.biometrics.co.za

For anyone interested, here is the episode of Challenge Talk where we discuss the idea of fully theming challenge caches. Seems like there is a general consensus that theming the challenge final cache itself in some way is much more enjoyable than just a run of the mill cache that signing is more like a smiley technicality.

Perhaps it's because the cache is a gift from the CO to the community, and the way we have of repaying that gift is to share our experiences through our logs whether that experience results in a precious smiley or not. Besides, if we didn't log our epic DNFs, what would there be to talk about at events? Points well taken - the only way we have to see activity on our hides is by the logs, and perhaps by communications at events or via the message center. Seeing unlogged activity (as defined by the OP) is problematic on many levels and is not likely to ever happen: How do you know they are searching for the cache? I use the app, at times, to check to see if I am too close when I am looking at a potential hiding spot by choosing a cache nearby and hitting Navigate. I also hit the Navigate to check distances to several that may be in the area - to help plan our spontaneous walk in the park, what's nearby? cache outings. That will not mean anything to the CO. And giving folks access to the detailed distance and time factors, I agree with Max and 99, that borders on creepy! More accurate logs are what will give the CO the best idea of activity on his/her hide whether that is a Found It, Write Note, or DNF. Detailed logs are even better!! And those logs you get from folks who use the official app, other apps, and plain old GPS units to search for and find caches - a much more accurate picture of what's happening with your cache.

Perhaps it's because the cache is a gift from the CO to the community, and the way we have of repaying that gift is to share our experiences through our logs whether that experience results in a precious smiley or not. Besides, if we didn't log our epic DNFs, what would there be to talk about at events?