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How To Sort/store Caches On Explorist With Gsak?


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What methods are people using for sorting there cache files for storing on the explorist? What good does all this memory give me if there is no good way to sort and store the caches. Now that GSAK supports it natively I'm trying to figure out a way to sort my caches into manageable chunks and make it intuitive to select which geocache file I need depending on the area. The 200 cache limit means I need lots of files.

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I live in south Alabama and travel to visit to several of the cities in the state and in the panhandle of Florida. I sort caches into files with up to 200 files based on the location I will travel near. I select "Nearest" and look through the top of the list to find the Cache I need once I get in the area. I would not for example load a "GOTO" for a cache in Birmingham if I was still located in the south of the state because I would need to go through a whole bunch of locations to get to the cache file I needed. I would wait till I got closer to B'ham to select the cache.

 

There is the problem of the number of files located in B'ham being greater the 200. I have 4 files containing caches for the North, south east and west of B'ham, and limit the file size to 100.

 

Hope this helps. It would be nice if there was an alphbetical lookup but there isn't so I just figured a different way to get what I needed.

 

Cheers

 

Muddler

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This is one very strong reason I wrote the 'magellanx' module for GPSBabel and worked with Clyde to get it hooked up in GSAK. 200 waypoints at a time (especially ones that you can't mark off the map as you go) just plain isn't enough.

 

Use the magellanx format which will give you 500 and go nuts with the waypoint names which are now 20 characters. It's tempting to use the waypoint comments buf you're still limited to 200 of those at a time. (If you're hunting with a PDA, that might not be a deal-breaker). Remember to name those files ".upt" and not ".gs".

 

Write, call, and otherwise annoy Magellan and tell them that 200 geocaches at a time isn't enough and we really need a way to delete them from the maps or otherwise mark them found as we go.

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Unless you have a particular reason for using the Geocache POIs other than that you can, Robert's advice to use the larger, editable regular POI arrangement may be best.

 

I am still using the Geocache POIs though I haven't really made up my mind if it makes sense to do so or not. I like being able to have benchmark waypoints in regular POI files and geocache POIs such that I can display one, the other, or both sets of data at the same time. Since I don't do that many at a time, not being able to edit or delete the geocache POIs hasn't bugged me *too* much.

 

I deal with the geocache POI division similar to Muddler. I divide my 500+ database into compass quandrants that overlap slightly in content. It's a little cumbersome to divide and load them, though if I get around to writing a macro it should be a single button click.

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When I got my 600 I quickly dumped the geocache mode in favor of POI's. Now that GSAK supports the explorist file natively and I can set how many to send to it at a time without setting flags and filtering on that I've gone back to the geocache mode. I like the appropriate icons being displayed on the map. I cover a lot of distance in my weekly travels and its difficult to load all the areas that I could potentially go to. I like to be able to cache on the fly and carry the entire state of Michigan on my Pocket PC at all times.

 

The fact that the Geocaches can't be edited, removed, or even marked as found is annoying.

 

If I didn't have to calibrate the compass every time I took the SD card out it wouldn't be so annoying to load the SD card from my Pocket PC.

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I've just used the GSAK Explorist geocache mode for the first time... I had to reconfigure my cache name and comment field. The first time I did it, the D/T and cache owner name showed up as the cache name.

 

I altered the cache ID to show the GCID plus the first two characters of the container, since the Explorist has no "container size" field.

 

Example, a micro would say something like GCFR4EMi.

 

Like Embra above, I'm not convinced the limitations of geocaching mode are worth it. But until they fix the issue with long lists of waypoints (where the associated waypoint icons doesn't scroll with the name of the waypoint).

 

Jamie

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