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I've been out of action for a while. Long enough that I can't remember how to use my GPS. Not so much the function...but getting caches onto the unit. Any help is greatly appreciated.

HHL: You are having more success with your Swedish lists, than I do with my Alberta and Saskatchewan lists. I note that your last four are all over the maximum of 750 caches to which I now appear to be limited. That is, my button "Add 750 to list" never goes higher than 750. I have tried several times with lists of 850 or more, and 750 is the maximum that I can add. Also, I have now worked out the process of creating lists from the search map which is a little trickier than I remember it being before. For example, before I figured out the process, when I had my map set to show only 50 caches at a time, (or 100 or 200), then, until I worked out the correct procedure, when I tried to add the geocaches I wanted to a list, my list would only contain 50, or 100, or 200, depending on what setting I was using for the number of caches to be shown on my map at the time I made the list. I have now worked out the crucial need to select the "Sort by" box on the upper left side of the screen beside the map. When I do that, I get the "Add 750 to list" box. Now that I have figured that part out, then (as you say), the procedure works "flawlessly" for me as well :-) Das Leben ist in der Tat eine Reise, aber für einige von uns hat es ein paar Wendungen mehr als für andere. :-) Vielen Dank für Ihre Antwort auf meinen Hinweis. MartyWalker1

I pre search when I travel and make lists. My caching is less random, especially these days. I am travelling now. I searched and listed unfound SideTracked caches, 200 caches, caches in county (council) areas I still haven't found any in, Mary Mackillop caches, a web cache, Earth caches, Virtual caches (I need to increase the finds of the last two for challenges. I used to ignore Earth caches.), and caches that I need to fulfil challenges. Then, if on some days I want more caches, I look for small sized caches and above. It has to be a very low available cache day to list micros, unless they fulfill one of the previous listed things. I don't need to do power trails; I would rather focus on fewer 'speciality' caches.

Near me is a "Bikeway Challenge Trail", 30 or so challenge caches along a a bikeway where our local group holds a CITO each year. When I first started geocaching, I attended the CITO and was encouraged by others to sign all the challenges along the route (we walked it). At that point I didn't think I'd ever qualify for any, with my handful of finds and some of them needing thousands of caches to qualify, like the 4444 or 7777 type (4000 trads, 400 mystery, 40 event, 4 webcam, for example). But those more experienced told me to sign anyway, and see what happens over the years - I might be surprised. I have actually completed 11 of those challenges, and I am very close to 2 or 3 others; still far away from 4444, 7777, the 200+ in a day, 10 icons in a day, 6 states in a day, etc; and I may eventually get those too if my health and motivation keeps up. I don't see these challenges as meant to "isolate or exclude", but as they are intended to be, a challenge to up my geocaching game and have some goals to reach! There's a lot about the geocaching experience that those new to it need to learn - and it does take time. Not everyone does travel bugs, or challenges, or mysteries, or Wherigo's - not that they are being excluded but there is a great variety to this hobby, and a you spend more time "doing it", you learn more and expand your horizons. Or not. It's your choice. Find those you can find, or want to, and ignore the rest, until the time comes when you DO want to go for more. Thanks to this thread, I just found one more along the trail that I can now log as a find! And a couple that have been added that were either missing or not a part of the trail when I first signed them all in 2018. I look at it as I've got more caching to do!!

I recently started Geocaching and love that I can combine it with my love for hiking. I always stay on the trails, but with GC I've now discovered great places off the trail both hiking and mtn biking that I can be comfortable exploring seeing as how people before me have blazed the way. Time to get a GPS! Its all about the kids this time of the year so my budget is $200 (Merry Christmas to me). I am comfortable with technology and would like something that won't be obsolete in a year or two. What I've found so far is: Garmin eTrex 20 and Magellan eXplorist 310. Which do you recommend and why? Is there another in this price range you would suggest? Thank you in advance for your advice!

Sure, that's what I usually do in the end. Or, if the cache allows it, resort to "alternate" solutions ... e.g. for one of the unsolved puzzles, I'm quite sure about the general area where the cache is (a roughly 200 m long and 20 m zone) and there are spoiler photos. Geocaching with very fuzzy coordinates ! Well ... I don't have to, but it would still be nice .

200? "Tis but a scratch! My longest is 437 days, between my daughter introducing me to the game and me deciding that I could have fun with it

Mine is 200 days. Oops. I can see where MNTA is coming from, my philosophy is that you can't enjoy summer without winter, or day without night. Plus a big dose of GeoElmo6000's "don't stress about it" ideal.

Before the benchmark purge, I am looking for users with the most benchmark logs, particularly with numbers in the thousands. Not found logs, but logs in general. So far I know of: shorbird = 11,553 AZcachemeister = 4,658 VagabondsWV = 4,601 kayakbird = 4,278 seventhings = 4,277 seadog129 = 4,106 Me & Bucky = 4,062 wister6813 = 3,998 Ernmark = 3,424 PFF = 2,522 Skyboy01 = 2,426 ArtMan = 2,354 mloser = 2,251 CallawayMT = 1,960 2/3 Marine = 1,913 edexter = 1,832 Supercheeseburger = 1,812 NorthWes = 1,685 topflitejr1 = 1,562 magtfplanner = 1,484 2oldfarts (the rockhounders) = 1,465 sillywillie = 1,456 Team Geo-Clarks = 1,317 southpawaz = 1,308 Ragfoot = 1,282 foxtrot_xray = 1,271 bvrballs = 1,261 Harry Dolphin = 1,243 TerraViators = 1,200 finds, unknown total AZTech = 1,078 GeoBama123 = 1,071 Papa-Bear-NYC = 1,036 Please let me know if you know of anybody else with substantial benchmark logs like the ones above.

There are recurring questions about trackable endurance and travel on the forum for which there are often very good responses, but based on limited information. The writer in a position to address most of the questions in more detail, and will do so in a series of posts over the next couple of years. I will explain. From January of 2010 to January 2023, I have released over 5,000 travel bugs at a rate of 200-450 per year. Over 13+ years some of the trackables have visited caches all over the world. They have been to every state in the US, every major administrative district (state, province, canton, oblast) in the countries of western and northern Europe, including the principalities of Andorra, San Marino, Lichtenstein and Monaco. My trackables have visited caches on every continent, including Antarctica. For now, the best supports of that claim are my past forum posts and the screen-captured map below, produced by gctrackables.com in open beta testing. What is shown is the distribution a sample of only a thousand of my trackables, sorted into either traveling trackables (blue markers) and missing trackables (green). For reasons unknown to me, not shown are the distribution of some trackables in caches. My trackables are not uniform in shape, size or composition. Some are simply the celebration tags marketed by Groundspeak (Makers, Holiday, CITO, Geopets, Zodiac, etc.), usually without attached items. However, most trackables do have items attached to dog tags (by chains or rivets) which can be glass, stone, wood, leather, metal, cloth patches or laminated images. Many are the size of poker chips (some are poker chips), others are smaller. There are keychain and jewelry pendants. The largest are laminated images measuring 2.25 x 3.25”. There are very few geocoins and no bowling pins or beanie babies. Should the reader wish to see photos of the trackables, they are all listed alphabetically by series name behind the “owned trackables” link on my profile page. I keep records on my trackables by series, based on either a theme or a general shape…see the first entries of the partial Comics spreadsheet below. After I enter drop dates, elapsed days between drops and the cumulative days between release and the most recent drop are calculated automatically. Shown in the first two columns are the number of drops achieved (Cnt for count) and the most recent drop log date (Last Log). These are also calculated automatically. A zero in the Cnt column means the trackable has either not moved, or has disappeared from, the container where it was released. I also maintain a catalog of my trackables…see partial catalog spreadsheet below. It displays part of the catalog with details about the Art Deco series. I hid many columns to make important information viewable as an image. There are two catalog numbers, the annual and total. Trackables are not cataloged until they are released. All entries start with the name, ID and tracking numbers and release dates and locations. The colored ID cells indicate missing travel bugs. For those, there is information on the last logged locations and dates, along with the count (Cnt) of drops achieved (retrieved from the respective series spreadsheet). The ultimate objective of this approach, decided upon years ago, was to enable comparisons of the rates of travel and survivorship among the series. For example, as a group, do poker chips have better histories than laminated images? For a series to be included for comparison in this project, I determined that each series must have at least one trackable achieve 30 drops, but there is a problem with that choice. Being 83 at this writing, there might not be enough time for me to do as much as once conceived. So, I will content myself with limited comparisons. Part 2 of this post defines release and drop, as employed in this project.

So true! one of my favorite multis and caching memories with my late father Weekend 1 - Hit wp1 30 miles north Weekend 2 - wp2 200 miles north was visiting my parents on a planned trip, also visited GCHQ since we were one neighborhood over. Weekend 3 - wp3 final 120 miles southwest my father drove down the following weekend he was eager to finish and get the FTF and a nice trip to the beach and Mo's for dinner. Great times, thank!

I have examined a specific segment of my trackables to establish a baseline rate of travel that should represent my entire collection of trackables…see the large figure and appended table below. The methods used to assemble the data are detailed in the previous five parts to this post. As before, the bottom row in the table is the n, or the number of trackables in the series that achieved each successive drop. The sample sizes decline from 3449 trackables at Drop 1 to 154 at Drop 30. The decline results from high attrition between early drops, losses of 11-16% while trackables are in the US, to 4-9% when the oldest-surviving trackables are outside the US. The solid-colored lines in the graph represent the top three rows of the table. They are the maximum (blue line) and minimum (gray) number of days required for a single trackable to achieve a specified drop. The orange line is the average days (the baseline) for all trackables to achieve a specific drop. The dotted line is the trend line for the average. The baseline is derived from the 24 series of trackables shown in the baseline contributors table below. The series are sorted into potential groupings that will likely be the basis of future comparisons. In those comparisons, the maximum and minimum lines will be omitted. They are retained here to illustrate the huge range of days for trackables to achieve specific drops. For example, for Drop 1, the min/max range is 0 to 3902 days, meaning there was one trackable released, retrieved and dropped again on the same day, whereas another trackable took 3902 days (10.7 years) to achieve the first drop. At 30 drops, the min/max values are 580 and 3966, respectively 1.6 and 10.9 years. The average to 30 drops is 1552 days (4.3 years). For convenience, I have also provided a days-to-years conversion table for each drop (see also below). The data at every drop are badly skewed because zero is the absolute limit to the minimum number of available days between drops, whereas there is no limit to the maximum. For the readers with a statistical bent, the standard (or average) deviation from the mean for each drop ranges from equal to, or more than twice that of the measured mean (average)…for normal (bell-shaped) distribution of values, we like to have values less than five percent of the mean, as opposed to the 100-200 percent seen here. Regrettably, the methods to attach any statistical significance to observed differences for skewed data have receded into the mental fog. Still, I can entertain myself by calculating averages and determining trends. The average rate of travel over 30 drops is 51.7 days (1552 ÷ 30), but that doesn’t tell the complete story. The rate of travel during the first 15 drops (when more than half of the trackables are in the US) is 67.2 days per drop (1008 ÷ 15), whereas the rate for drops 16 through 30 (when more than half of the surviving trackables are outside the US, mostly Europe) is 36.3 days per drop ([1552 – 1008] ÷ 15). While I do believe trackables move more frequently in Europe than in the US, these values do not constitute proof, they are merely suggestive. The reason being there are unquantified fractions from each region represented in early and late drops. That said, if I ever decide to winnow and compare US-only and Europe-only cohorts, I have every confidence that the difference will be even greater than reported here. That there are differences in the early and late rates of travel can be seen by comparing the baseline with the trend line. The trend line is straight while the baseline is a gentle arc, reflecting how the rate of travel decreases with subsequent drops. This the concluding part of this post. This project will continue later with another multi-part post comparing series of trackables with each other, and to the baseline.

I remember trying to drop off a TB I brought from London that wanted to go to a particular suburb in Sydney and I was trying to do this. Cache after cache I visited were micros listed as smalls. It got VERY annoying and did nothing to make the game enjoyable. Finally I found a real small and could leave the TB in that. It's not hard to rate the cache size correctly. Those &%$@ & NANOs, they are the cause of many wrong size ratings. You would have hated my caching trip today. Bush bashing through dense vegetation. After more than an hour we had only got 100 to 200 metres closer to the cache. Called it a day, but will try again.

And as far as the other reply: I disagree about integrating the builder with the site, at least from a technical level. If we had a web-based builder app, we could perform a seamless redirection between both applications. Besides, with the API in place, the Urwigo builder can also offer a seamless experience. You can use the app to search for cartridges either by the map or any other UI because, you know: API. Templates are a good idea. I was mostly thinking about smaller snippets, but it's reasonable that someone could build a larger template. I'd rather start with cartridges being closed source because almost all are tied to a final geocache. I can't simply remove the last zone in a cartridge when it's copied because there isn't a simple way to tell what the last zone is. Other cartridges simply tell the final coordinates. I'd rather incentivize open source sharing or say a cartridge automatically becomes open source after a period of one or two years after its last update. I forgot about the media resizing feature. But, yes, media should automatically fit the view, but should be capped at zooming in 200% to avoid being too pixelated. Hopefully, it's more about downscaling. Yes, there won't be completion codes because of the API. When the cartridge marks itself as complete, the player app will send that information to the site via the API when the device has a data connection again (or immediately if it does at that time). Assets get a bit difficult to work with because we'd need some sort of community curation. Fortunately, someone could create an asset management application and API for builder apps to use. It does not have to be tied to the listing service's API (really, it shouldn't anyway). I don't have experience with Unity. However, the player app itself should be able to load different player runtime environments. This would allow for v1 to work, v2, and anything more complicated, such as something with Unity. Wherigo v1 wasn't map-based because it predated devices being Internet-connected. These days, Internet connectivity is the norm. So, the UI should be primarily map-based I'll be relying on others, then, to come up with a good UI for the website. I can hold my own, but a graphic designer and animator I am not. Perhaps Wherigo Invaders is the perfect way to gamify the site. I should probably make a long post to cover what Wherigo Invaders is. You have concepts from travel bugs, Ingress, Munzee, trading card games, and whatnot, and this provides a sort of meta game that gets you to revisit cartridges. And the other items: If you're considering integrating Waymarking with Wherigo, you'll need to answer some questions. First: what is Wherigo at its core? How would including waymarks strengthen Wherigo's core fun factor? (Waymarking could have been Swarm/Foresqure, but was never developed upon after its release.) How easy would it be for an average Wherigo author to include AR? We need it to be easier and more enticing to set up Wherigo cartridges. AR could be explored in the long term, but building a fun core game that can be fairly easy to create content for is a priority. We need the map to fill up with cartridges. Skinning was on my shorter list. However, I didn't think about skinning the map itself. (That is, allow the author to create a map upon which the game is played instead of the satellite or road map. We'll have to either have map tiles or just a very high resolution, large map file. That could be doable. Credits and such play into Wherigo Invaders. Challenges would be interesting. I forgot about adding to the player API the ability to query the current time. Good idea.

Nope, they're not. When I started caching back in 2004 I don't think there was a premium cache with 200 miles. I still remember how offended I was when one showed up nearby. I swore I would never make any of my caches PMO. Times change, in 2004 you needed a $200+ GPS to play, now it's free. Anyone with a smart phone (which is pretty much anyone over 6 years old) can download the app and start caching (or pranking cachers). These days almost all my caches are PMO, it's not a cure but it helps cut down on all sorts of issues. Out of curiosity I ran a PQ of caches near his one find. (can you tell I'm retired) I put them in GSAK and searched for any logs by the user and, out of around 700 caches, the only one was his single "found it" on your cache. No bogus NM or NA logs or anything like that. My take is that he's a bored kid sending messages and seeing who will respond.

Resistiver Touchscreen Ein resistiver Touchscreen besteht aus Schichten, die auf Druck reagieren, der auf den Bildschirm ausgeübt wird. Da resistive Touchscreens auf Druck reagieren, können Sie den Bildschirm mit einem Stift, dem Fingernagel oder anderen Utensilien berühren. Resistive Bildschirme können auch mit Handschuhen bedient werden, was sie ideal für die Jagd, das Schneemobilfahren und das Skifahren macht. Achten Sie darauf, dass Sie nicht zu viel Druck ausüben, da dies den Bildschirm beschädigen könnte. Modelle mit resistivem Touchscreen: Alpha 100 Approach G3, G5 Dakota 10, 20 Montana 600, 610, 610t, 650, 650t, 680, 680t Oregon 200, 300, 400c, 400i, 400t, 450, 450t, 550, 550t Mit ein Grund warum ich meinem O 450 so hinterher trauere, da hat einfach alles gepasst.

Just to clarify, there could be 200 of the same waymark titles in the same city? Starbucks - Wi-Fi Hotspot - New York City, NY, USA

Recently, I have discovered 2 geocachers in my area who have logged caches as 'found' but their caching handles do not appear on the log sheets. While they are relative newbies (one <100 finds, the other <200), they should have sufficient understanding about claiming a find. I have reached out to both... with no response. I do not believe that they just "didn't have a pencil"; I believe this is claiming a find without physical presence, and hoping the owner does nothing. I know I can delete the log, but if this is a habit, and I'm the only one 'policing' my caches, then this pattern will continue. I can check one because 'his' handle is public to review other caches claimed; I cannot check the other as 'his' handle is private. comments? suggestions?

As someone who has searched for and documented well over 1,200 benchmarks over the past 20 years, it certainly was very surprising and disappointing to discover that the benchmark hunting section of Geocaching.com was gone without any warning to me. I do not regularly read the forums, so I had no idea this change was imminent. I only found out when I researched it after the fact. I receive plenty of emails from Groundspeak about souvenirs and their latest promotions—would it have been that difficult for them to send a message about the "retirement" of the benchmark pages? Another thing that should have been done was to add a deprecation announcement to each benchmark page, so it would be obvious to anyone viewing the pages that after a certain date, the benchmark pages would no longer be available. It's just standard practice. But apparently it's too late for any of that. I understand the need to move away from legacy code that has become a maintenance burden, hinders future innovation, and does not fit the current goals of the organization. Frankly, given the lack of updates to the benchmarking portion of the site, I expected this to happen a long time ago, and that's why I began documenting my survey mark recoveries on my own website instead. But many people did not have that option, and they put a lot of time and effort into their benchmark logs on Geocaching.com. We have also heard over and over how useful geocachers' logs have been for professional surveyors. We had built an impressive archive of historical documentation over the decades, much of which is not available elsewhere, and it is a shame to lose that. For anyone who wants to retrieve the text (not the photos) of their benchmark logs and see others' logs for a particular mark, you can use Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The benchmarking home page (as of December 30, 2022) is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20221230041305/https://www.geocaching.com/mark/ The postal code search doesn't work, but the PID search does, at least for all PIDs I have tried. To go directly to a mark's page, you can use URLs of the form: https://web.archive.org/web/20221208090238/https://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.aspx?PID=[PID] where [PID] is the mark's PID. Unfortunately, because I don't see a way to view the marks a user has logged, you will need to know the PIDs of any marks you want to look up on the Wayback Machine archive. The NGS Data Explorer can help with that: https://geodesy.noaa.gov/NGSDataExplorer/ I hope this is useful. To anyone who enjoyed this activity, took it seriously, and understands its value, please spend some time on the NGS website and learn how to submit your data directly to them instead. Survey marks are still in constant use and your efforts will be appreciated there.

I have used Erik's webpages quite frequently recently (THANKS again, great site!). Looking forward to the new developments in 2023. On the basis of his page showing the top posters (total, region, first in country&region), I was thinking who has posted and visited the most unique categories. On the basis of the top 200 posters in Erik's file ( https://wm.familie-frohne.net/count_user.php ), I did a manual check of each WayMarkers' profile (combined, post and visit). Created an document in Excel to capture the data et voila... see file attached. I will regularly update on my profile page. Hopefully Erik can do some of his magic in a future update :-) happy holidays season to every and hope you have a great start of 2023! Frank Update 28-12 Updated the file (missed a few people and made a mistake by adding someone by error). Used input of all top 230 Waymarkers (700+ posts). Nevertheless, I can not easily see when someone has visited a lot of different categories. I could potentially miss a few waymarkers with high levels of finds, if they have low level of posts.

I've been thinking and pondering this for awhile - and I went back to see my goals for 2020 (I wonder what happened to the 2021 thread?), and apparently there was no 2022 thread....anyway: Here are my goals for 2020: Get my total find count to 2020. My goal for 2019 was to reach 2000 finds; I'm still over 200 away from that goal, and maybe 2020 in 2020 is attainable! Find a cache on Feb. 29 to finish my calendar grid. We filled every day in 2018 except for Feb. 29, and this will be our first opportunity to fill that day since we began geocaching in 2017. Host an event. We've attended events, but never hosted one. I applied for one of the Celebration events - we'll see if that comes through. Hide 12 more caches. Same goal as 2019, and I only got 6 hidden then. I'll go for 12 again! Complete at least one Adventure Lab Cache. A few have popped up in reasonable driving distance, and I'm curious to see how it goes. I enjoy Wherigo caches, when they work! How did I do? I did reach 2020 finds on 10/26/2020 - my log for GC91PE9 - https://coord.info/GL131EHA0 I did find a cache on Feb. 29 - in fact, I found 7 that day, one being a Feb. 29th event that happened to be one of the last events held in our area (or anywhere else!) for a LOOOONG time. I did NOT host an event in 2020; I did receive one of the Celebration events, but....COVID. I eventually hosted my event in June 2022, https://coord.info/GC8ZE3T I did NOT hide 12 more caches. I actually completed a couple of Adventure Labs by the end of 2019, and did a few more in 2020, so that goal was reached! 3/5 for 2020, despite COVID. GOALS for 2023 - as 2022 draws to a close.... Host a CITO, and possibly a "regular" event Reach 3000 finds - we've averaged about 500 a year since our start in 2017, I'm currently at 2587, so it's attainable, especially if we do more travelng, as we hope to do Keep my "traditionals" at 75% or less of total finds; in other words, up my puzzles, multi's, Wherigo's and challenges - though now with Adventure Labs, it's a lttle easier to keep trads below 75% Hide a few more and continue to maintain the hides I do have; between hubby's and mine, it's a challenge at times! Merry Christmas to all, and may 2023 bring all good things to all of you!

What to do with the eXplorist 200, 210, 300, 400, 500 and 600 models I just purchased off eBay? Have not found an explorist XL I want just yet....

The new search result release seems to have solved this problem. (It did create a lot of other problems that have been or are being fixed.) I want to thank GS for fixing this issue. The new remaining difficulty, for me, is that now one can only add at most 200 caches at a time from a filtered search result to a list. I understand from another thread that this issue is being addressed. Of course, one can add additional caches from the search in batches of 200, so it is not a big problem.

I was trying to add my found caches to lists. Since there is more than 1,000 of them, it has to be more than one list. I painstakingly searched five times, using the "find date" filter to exclude the ones I had already listed. After each search, I clicked "add 1,000 to list" followed by "create a new list" and named the lists with the date of the first find in that list. The result was this, except I have since then added 200 caches to one of the lists. So I got five empty lists. No caches added. Then I made another search, not involving own finds, resulting in over 1,000 caches. Tried to click "add 1,000 to list" again, and was presented with this: Note that several of these lists are empty, still it is not allowed to add 1,000 caches to them. I clicked the check mark to select the caches on the first page of the search result only, clicked "add 100 to list", and then those were added to the selected list. Finally, I made a search resulting in over 900 caches, and those I could add with one click to one of the empty lists. So in conclusion, it seems not possible to add the first 1,000 out of a search result of 1,000 or more caches even to an empty list. Of course making it even more excruciating to make lists out of a large search result, e.g. to be able to compile a list of your own find history.

The new layout only shows a maximum of 200 search results at one time. I use the search feature mainly to create lists of caches. This restriction makes working with list very tedious. Before the update I did a search, getting maybe 840 results and could export them to a list with two clicks. Now I have to export the first 200, then the next and so on. Very user-un-friendly!