Pocket Query Question

[Andys101 & Redfrock]

have been following mark and lynne's guide to PQs (fab - thanks) and have successfully done what they suggest. Howver they say about running a weekly PQ for updates in the last week. Having previewed this I see that it is over the 500 limit (too many of us out there it would seem!), so what is the best way round this? Ta

[+makerofthingsup]

Maybe run two queries with different criteria.

[+webscouter.]

Find several hundred and only search for those that you haven't found.

[+Teuchters]

There are just less than 7600 caches in the UK at the moment - not including some islands and (parts of?) Ireland. About 10% of these are archived - in any case, thats still a lot. PQ's are limited to 500 returns, so you would need round about 15 separate PQ's to get all the cache details for every one. Caches are being placed at an ever increasing rate - so extra PQ's will be needed above the 15 to get all the UK caches in the near future possibly. Things might slow down over the winter months?? It's interesting to note (in Mark and Lynn's pdf guide that only 9 PQ's were needed in September 2004!!) Pharisee has posted a list that extends Mark and Lynn's date list to get all the current caches. List here

You are limited to 20 PQ's total in any case. Some days of the week are not good for running PQ's. There is a thread on the US forums which will actually tell you the reasons for this - folk going caching at the weekend topping up their lists. Thursday is not a good day at all....

So you could try setting up 15 separate PQ's to run on a quiet day of the week (Tuesday??) or try spreading them around on the quiet days to get more chance of them running. The more frequently you get them to run, the less chance they have of running, if you get me. GC.com's dedicated PQ server looks to see how often your PQ's run - if they run very regularily (eg every day) then they go to the back of the queue and may not run at all. To get a good percentage return rate, run on say, Tuesday, but only every so often. A PQ that has never run at all will always go to the top of the queue and will come back to you almost immediately.

Limiting your PQ criteria to say, caches not found but within 50 miles of home may give you all the info you need?

I hope this is helpful.

[+Learned Gerbil]

Just to note that you can't run 15 queries on one day so you need to spread them.

[+68 GUNS]

I currently run 15 pqs spread over 7 days Sat-Fri so that be the weekend I have a completely refreshed list. To keep the database up to date you will also need to filter GSAK to check for any caches that have not been updated in the last week and download the gpx file from those individual cache pages, this will then keep the archived caches correct.

I was running a daily pq to check for caches placed in the last 7 days, this is necessary if you want all the previous log entries to be downloaded. Pq's only send the last 5 logs, so new caches which generally have a lot of activity in the first week, if left to the weekly updates would possibly be missing several log entries. Unfortunately, due to the increase in activity on the PQ server this one rarely arrives so I now have to create the pq and "run it once, and delete" every day to get the same result.

I guess it all depends how much history you want, and how much time you want to spend updating GSAK!!

[+Teuchters]

Just to note that you can't run 15 queries on one day so you need to spread them.

Oops - You can create up to 20 queries. However, a maximum of 5 queries can be run each day. So spread them out!! (Gerbils are so clever!! )

[markandlynn]

have been following mark and lynne's guide to PQs (fab - thanks) and have successfully done what they suggest. Howver they say about running a weekly PQ for updates in the last week. Having previewed this I see that it is over the 500 limit (too many of us out there it would seem!), so what is the best way round this? Ta

I run this PQ daily in an attempt to capture caches that are archived/changed. It always hits 500 every day you run it and when imported into GSAK it updates (ie changes) 500 records each day. It is merely an attempt to keep my database up to date.

Hope this makes sense.