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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????!!!

An open letter to Groundspeak administration: In the early 2000s a fledgling company, looking to expand its product line and thereby increase its customer base, imported a database of benchmarks that its customers could search and log from what is now know as NOAA. Over time the customers provided the necessary additional products (geocaches) to allow the company to survive and grow. To Groundspeak’s administration benchmarks became a forgotten backwater as evidenced by the benign neglect that the platform has endured for many years. Now this same administration wants to remove benchmarking and its remarkable compendium of logs and photographs, one of the elements that helped the company survive its infancy. Let’s examine the reasons that they have stated for this wrongheaded decision: The game is global and benchmarking is a United States pursuit. As others have stated, there are multiple geocaching pursuits that are all or nearly all US based among them the APE cache(s), the original stash plaque and various events limited to HQ and environs. So “globalism” does not make a compelling argument. Very few people engage in benchmarking so it doesn’t make economic sense to support it. This should be entered in a dictionary of “self fulfilling prophesies” as a quintessential example. I can think of no other segment of the Groundspeak universe that has received as little marketing and promotion as benchmarking. For quite some time you have had to stumble over it to find it compared to everything else. I know some people that primarily looked for benchmarks during the early part of the pandemic before much was known about the virus’s survivability on caches or other surfaces. Imagine what a boost it would have been to the hobby if Groundspeak had actively promoted benchmarking during that time. The code is old and upkeep is costly. Who’s fault is that? I am certain that the code running the geocache part of the platform is not from 2002. I’ve lived through outages (that I fully understand) caused by multiple upgrades over the years. The ONLY reason we are at this juncture is because administration decided not to spend the money years ago to do the maintenance needed on the benchmarking side. Now we, the paying customer, will pay the price by losing part of the game. Shame on you, Groundspeak, for failing to spend our money wisely. Speaking of spending our money wisely, now I turn to the excuse that the benchmarking code is getting in the way of new and exciting projects. I have no idea what those are because no one has shared that information. Unlike some members of this board I have no faith, based on the last decade of “innovations” some of which have gone by the wayside, that I and many like me will find them a good trade for removing benchmarking. Imagine if the money lost on some of those “innovations” had been directed at upgrading the benchmarking code. Groundspeak likes to talk about the “Language of Location” The language of location in the United States was established by the survey crews that gradually established the network of horizontal and vertical locations that enabled the building of roads and bridges, homes and factories, canals and railroads, cities and towns that made the USA. This was often backbreaking work in inhospitable conditions. It required axe work and lugging surveying chains as often as using precision instruments like theodolites. These precisely measured locations (whether horizontal, vertical or both) are still used today, even in the era of the Global Positioning System, to make sure that water doesn’t flow in the wrong direction, houses aren’t built on the wrong property and for many other reasons. As benchmarkers we have helped find missing markers and reported those that have been destroyed. As august a presence as Dave Doyle, retired NGS chief geodetic surveyor, recently said in the Benchmarking forum “Many thanks to so many who have posted great pictures and hand-held positions that I've been able to harvest and improve the quality of tens of thousands of stations in the National Spatial Reference System.” Perhaps if Jeremy, Bryan, Elias or one of the more public facing lackeys had ever made the hike to station Buttermilk, (https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=LX4113) the oldest surviving triangulation station in the country, they might have experienced the same sense of awe and history that I did when I visited that site. But none of them did, despite traveling to many parts of the USA to promote Groundspeak and its activities (and, for many of the lackeys, to geocache.) They might have learned with a little research that Ferdinand Hassler, the first superindentent of the US Coast Survey, spent two weeks in June of 1833 with his wagon of instruments and his survey team setting this mark. I’ve been to the Original Stash Plaque and the Tunnel of Light APE cache. They are certainly historical but not remotely in the same class as finding Station Buttermilk. The only things that have come close are finding TU2116 (https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=TU2116) a benchmark placed by the Republic of Hawaii (check your history boys and girls) in 1896 and GS0206 (https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=GS0206) a gravity station in Death Valley (there are as many types of “benchmarks” as there are geocaches, some as rare as webcams.) None of the solutions that have been proposed on this forum have the same functionality as the current system. Waymaking does not have the database, NGS DataExplorer does not have the photographs and NOAA certaily does not want recovery notes every few months on the more popular and easily found stations. Finally, eliminating benchmarking from this site would be the equivilant of burning down a unique and valuable library, a library that has played a far more valuable civic role than any other aspect of this hobby. The current situation of low usage and old code is primarliy the result of decisions, conscious or subconscious, made by Groundspeak’s administration over the years. These same people can fix the problem by spending the money to revamp the system and market the activity. To rather spend money to move the hobby further from its roots toward more instant gratification may result in short term gain but long term loss. I urge reconsideration of this decision. Benchmarking is this community’s connection to the history of geolocation. Let’s strengthen that connection, not lose it. Michaelcycle and Susancycle

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

I got a taste of what when I had a temporary mobility problem. I broke my right ankle while looking for a cache. Finally after almost 3 months I could try to cache again but I had to be careful. So I picked T1 caches. It was a lesson in frustration. I ended up driving sometimes for hours to find a cache I could do wearing an ankle brace and using a cane. I'd walk a kilometre on a nice crushed stone level rail trail and when I was 50m from the cache I'd stare down a steep rocky slope with a little 3 foot wide creek at the bottom that needed to be jumped over. Or I'd get to a cemetery but the cache would be a 50m trek at the back of the cemetery into the woods through thick brush and fallen trees. It happened far too often. I complained here in the forums but got little sympathy. Mostly the talk was about the minutiae of what T1 means. And how handicapped people need to bring someone with them to do the retrieving. Unfortunately few people can empathize with the problem. Why post a cache as a T1 if it isn't actually a flat accessible surface all the way to the cache? At least post a T1.5. Why not err on the side of a terrain rating that is a little higher (a T2+) than too low. It's probably a statistics thing. T1 is probably covetted for grid fillers and challenge enthusiasts. I agree, it is cruel.

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?

Yes, after my recent run-in with this that saw months of cache preparation go down the gurgler, I'll give it as many up-votes as I can. This is supposed to be the Year of the Hide and there's been much talk about the contribution COs make to the game, but this is something that would actually be really helpful to cache owners. The Help Centre says "Solve nearby geocaches, including Mystery and Multi-Caches, to discover hidden stages" but that's of no help once you've found those solved mysteries and multis because all you see on any of the site's maps is a smiley face at the posted coordinates.

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!!!!!!!!!!!

Just like GC didn't update the database with new info from NGS, NGS does not have all the recovery info and pictures that have been posted here. Can't compare the two, sadly. Please note, if anyone submits information, to keep it professional, and only update it if it hasn't been in a year or more, OR, if something major has changed. No names, no funny stories. Those are used by professionals, and whatever you put in there is never deleted, never removed, and will be publicly available forever. I'll be removing the links to the GC site from my Android app and GE plugin then. They were useful before, with additional pictures and all, but if they're all gonna be wiped, there's absolutely no reason to link to GC anymore. Whatever this new project is, I won't even be interested. Frankly, if GC shows it 1/10th the love that it showed benchmarks in the last 22 years, the 'new project' will be gone in 5 years, and I don't have the time to set up a new API and program in new info trading for something that's not gonna last. Sadly, same here. I was a premium member for one time, and when BM code updates stopped happening, it wasn't worth it. I don't geocache, it bores me. (And the one time I DID? Someone stole the geocoin.) While the BM Forum has died down to a quiet whisper, I still checked it regularly, and enjoyed the talk and banter. Disappointed, but not surprised that it was going to happen, just am that it happening this soon. [Edited by Moderator to remove potty language.]

This is just another thing that GC is taking away from me, all of those places and logs and pictures that are just going to be deleted forever. My dead husband and I spent many hours, miles and love of a sport that is now going to be gone. I could come here and at least relive those times he and I had together. So, this is truly goodbye GC. On November 1, without our benchmarking logs and without being able to go to Off Topic to talk to friends that I had made there, there will be no reason for me to return. You have caused me many tears and heartache this year. There is nothing else you could do, as we had archived all our caches before John died in 2019. So this year you killed off, Off Topic and now Benchmark Hunting plus deleting all mention of any of the logs and the Benchmark forum as well. I have a very bad case of heartache right now, thanks to a place that we used to love coming to and where I could come to be with people who remembered John. There, I have had my say, and I know it won't mean a whit to anyone. But, it had to be said. Sincerely, Shirley Bloomfield

Wow, that's impressive. I sometimes wish TB's could talk, and let us know the story of their journey between the logs. Was it someone that simply stopped caching and found the TB's after a while and sent them out again? Someone that passed away and their partner / relative / friend set the TB's free? Did someone buy them at a garage sale not knowing what they were? A TB hoarder who was visited by the ghosts of caches past?

Ironic that you include Wherigos on there. Talk about something you all have let stagnate forever that had so much potential that just became quizzes and reverse solvable before you go junk. Benchmarks are a part of history. No move of a level playing field, actually. It's there or it's not. Just like a cache. OMG what a concept. And even when it's not people still log it as a cache. Cool - so other parts of the world don't have benchmarks. SO? Kinda like a HQ or Maze or Giga icon. Sure, maybe they get around, but to the masses? Rationale for this is weak. Nobody: Nobody: Cachers: Benchmarkers: Newbies: Literally nobody ever in any way shape or form: Groundspeak: Yeah, let's go ahead and stop doing something that takes us literally no effort and that, while only a small group of people love it they really do love it, and just up and cancel it for no reason whatsoever with nominal notice and call it 'progress'.

I should clarify: the OP is more than welcome to learn how to tree/rock/whatever-climb. I'm not trying to gatekeep this sport. But because it's being presented as "I want to find a couple caches that are high up in trees, where can I buy rope?", I am anxious for the OPs safety. It is not the right mindset here. The question they really should have asked is "where can I learn how to climb trees/rocks/whatever safety." OP: Learn how to climb rocks/trees/whatever in a rock/tree/whatever-climbing class. Use the gear provided by instructors. Make sure you are comfortable. Talk to the instructors. They will be more than happy to help you find rope, harnesses, etc. They are the experts, not random strangers on a Geocaching forum.

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.

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

We all are customers of this site, whether it is explicit, by paying premium membership and purchasing products like hats, shirts, and travel bug tags, or implicit, by keeping the number of visitors to the site up, which helps bring adv. dollars to GC.com. As a customer of the GC.com website, do you like the forums better now that there is a strict policy about being totally on subject and sticking only to talk about geocaching ? My personal view is that the website has become boring, and one could affirm this by looking at the number of times I have logged on recently vs. about two months ago. I hope this posting does not get shut down. I am not posting this question with any ill intent towards GC.com, but rather, am a less than 100% satisfied customer, wondering what other customers think. As a for-profit entity, I am suspect answers to this post could be valuable. Thanks

My fiancee has a Visor edge PDA, while I'm looking to buy the Viewsonic v36. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience trying to beam files from a PDA to PPC or vise versa. Will a database file (for example) from her PDA work on my PPC? Totally new to the whole thing so please forgive my utter ignorance. Thanks in advance!

I found out about a talk in Menlo Park that I thought might be of interest to geocachers due to his involvement with the USGS. Simon Winchester, geologist, journalist, and author, to the USGS. He will be in Menlo Park to speak about his most recent book, "Krakatoa," Friday, August 22, 2003 1:30pm in the USGS Building 3 large conference room A U.S. Geological Survey 345 Middlefield Road, Menlo Park, CA Winchster's previous books include "The Professor and the Madman," and "The Map That Changed the World." He is currently working on his next book about the 1906 SF Earthquake.

Not wishing to sound negative, but these days that's not as easy as it looks. Some years back, a large multinational media company bought up all the regional newspapers in Australia and, under the pretext of COVID, shut down the print editions and put the online editions behind their national newspaper's paywall. Notwithstanding, though, there have been occasional radio segments about geocaching, both on the local radio stations and the state-wide broadcaster, and I think at one time a presenter on one of the local stations was actually a geocacher. We also had a mega nearby in 2018 that got a lot of local publicity and I'm pretty sure Geocaching NSW ran a series of newcomer-welcoming events in recent times. As far as I can tell, though, this type of publicity has a pretty low success rate, with most of the longer-term cachers around here coming into the game by either knowing an existing cacher or discovering it through their own browsings. I saw it in an article in an outdoor adventure magazine, though I'd heard of it prior to that but hadn't paid it much attention, but it was only by actually going out into the bush on my own terms and finding some caches that I really got hooked. Just reading about it, listening to a talk or even watching a demonstration won't do that. I don't know what the number of cachers as a percentage of population is nationally but I'd imagine it'd be pretty low, probably about one in ten thousand. The muggle population of my local area (the Woy Woy Peninsula) is about 36,000 and the whole of the Central Coast is about ten times that, so our number of cachers probably isn't that low as a percentage, it's just we don't have very many people to start with. I think the bigger problem we have here is that the focus of the game has shifted from outdoor adventure to quick points-scoring. The newer P&G caches around here don't seem to have any shortage of finders, like GX8P7PD at Terrigal that was published in April and has 23 finders, or GC92TXE at Mooney Mooney that was published in February and has 21 finds. Top of the list on the Central Coast is the Adventure Lab bonus cache GC9M49Z that was published in January and has 35 finds. It's the bushland hides that are really languishing, like GC9QR5W that's only had one finder (me) since it was published in April, yet I really think it's the non-P&G hides that keep people in the game long-term. For me at any rate, if the only caches available in 2013 had been mint tins in parking lot guard rails, I'd have lost interest in a matter of weeks.

Your town has caches owned by several different folks that are at least logging into the website in the last few weeks and granted 200ish caches within 30 miles is not a large amount I bet the number of folks that feel similarly are higher than you'd guess. My point is business as usual is not going to change things so try something different, all we hear is doom and gloom. From old GS blog: "`But there might be one you own that most local geocachers have already found and the location is not frequented by tourists. It could be time to archive it and free up the area, or you might consider creating a new and improved cache!" As I recall this blog post was not well received here, but I agree with it. Talk to the local hiders. Try something new something different. Encourage your unknown neighbors to hide new caches. Not everyone goes to events so they may be out there. Take that rusty tin with mushy log and throw it away and replace it with a shiny new cache. I had a local cacher approach me if I wanted to join their competition to find lonely caches as I had recently found 2, do something with hides maybe. Click on any new finders and see if they are local and encourage them to join. Just trying to help

I've yet to experience geocaching, but have enjoyed orienteering. I am a freelance writer interested in talking to people in the Toronto, Canada area to get their input on how they enjoy the sport, what draws them to it, is their family going along, etc. If you would be willing to share some experiences and insights with me (and perhaps let me tag along on a sample outing), I'd love to hear from you. Am particularly interested in families for an outing, but want to talk to anyone for feedback. [This message was edited by freewrite44 on June 27, 2003 at 08:36 AM.]

Hi. I'm new to this and I've heard of the NWPA Geocachers. I was hoping to talk to some of the members. I'm mainly looking for tips and any info on joining. Thanks in advance for any replies.

Why do some people drive 10 mph under the speed limit in the left lane? Why do some people sit directly behind you in an almost empty movie theater, then talk throughout the movie? It's because they're jerks, and they're doing it because they can. If they get a reaction from you, it's all the better for them. Sadly, there's not much you can do about them - jerks will always find a way to be a jerk.

Talk about anything in this topic! [This message was edited by Radman Version 2.0 on March 27, 2003 at 01:30 PM.]

Do not write anything that is about avatars. They only can be discussed in another thread. But do write about geocaching in eight words. That's not six, or seven, but eight words.