How Does Paperless Caching Work

[+Relic Hounds]

I was just wondering how paperless caching works And if my Palm M505 Would work for it

[+Miragee]

Your Palm M505 will work great. I've been using my Palm M500 (in a hard case) for more than a year now.

 

I use Cachemate on my Palm.

 

I Export the data for the Palm from GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife).

 

I get the data for that program from Pocket Queries, which you can create after you become a Premium Member of this site. Each Pocket Query can contain up to 500 caches.

[+clatmandu]

Just like Miragee said. Once you have everything loaded, your pda will have the cache pages in it, including past finders logs, hints, everything you see now when you print out the page. Once you find the cache, you can write in the pda what you traded, and any other notes. No more binders full of cache pages that might be out of date or archived

[+Relic Hounds]

SO do i Have to be a premium member to be able to do it?

[+Miragee]

Sort of . . .

 

If you aren't a Premium Member, you can only download the .loc files and those do not contain very much information. The .gpx files have the hints and past logs.

 

When I first became a Premium Member, I paid the $3.00 per month for several months until I could finally come up with the $30.00 for the whole year. Can you spare the $3.00 each month . . .

[+Relic Hounds]

I throught it cost more than thirty dollars for the year i will definitly look in to doing that Thanks

[n003lb]

Is there a tutorial or information page somewhere on how to do paperless caching? At this time, I don't have a PDA that would work for it, but I will have one within a few months, maybe sooner. I keep seing stuff about paperless caching, and I know what it is, but I haven't found anything explaining the particulars of exactly how to do it. Sorry if this is a stupid question.

Edited March 16, 2006 by n003lb

[+Kealia]

Not a stupid question at all.

 

Here's a good tutorial - just one way to do it.

[+Team Cotati]

Just like Miragee said. Once you have everything loaded, your pda will have the cache pages in it, including past finders logs, hints, everything you see now when you print out the page. Once you find the cache, you can write in the pda what you traded, and any other notes. No more binders full of cache pages that might be out of date or archived

 

We must have been doing something wrong. Prior to going paperless, The Team managed to find over 200 caches and we didn't even HAVE a binder. I find it very curious how people that have difficulty coming up with the Premium membership fee for PQing caches are able to justify the cost of gas used in hunting the things.

Edited March 16, 2006 by Team Cotati

[+Jhwk]

For noo3lb:

Another tutorial that I used is here.

[n003lb]

THanks for those links. I'll check them out. Is there any basic requirements for the Palm unit? My mom has a Palm unit, I think it's called a Palm III, but I'm not sure without looking at it again. I haven't done much research into Palms for about 3 years, so I don't remember the names real well. If this is a Palm III, would it work? It is a color model, and has an SD Card slot.

 

BTW, my user name is n003lb, as in:

 

NOVEMBER-ZERO-ZERO-THREE-LIMA-BRAVO

 

It's a registration number for an aircraft for those of you non-aviation nuts out there. Most people think it's some variation of "noobi", but it isn't.

[+Jhwk]

BTW, my user name is n003lb

 

Apology accepted

Do a little research on the Palm III. From everything I have read here in the forums, as long as you have ~2MB internal memry, you should be able to load and run Cachemate and 500-1000 caches.

 

Gooooogling Palm III I found that the unit should have 2MB of memory. Give it a shot. The worst that could happen is it wouldn't work...

 

If you want to stay cheap, you could probably find an older M100 series palm with 8MB memory for under $25. That would be enough to hold thousands of caches.

[+sbell111]

Regarding 'paperless' caching using your pda, there are basically two ways to go if you are a Palm owner. You can download the cache pages to your unit using Cachemate or Plucker. Cachemate costs $8, Plucker's free.

 

I have both programs on my TE, but I personally prefer Plucker's output. CYBret's Geocacher U webpage does an excellent job of walking you through how to use Plucker. I can only offer two additional bits of advice.

 

Instead of Plucker's desktop application, I use Sunrise's Desktop application. It still sends the info to your pda's Plucker application, but I think it runs faster and is easier to get any pics on the cache pages to your pda.

 

I also use Cache Log Book. It's a great little palm application that allows you to create a database of all the caches the you attempt. It logs the date and time of your attempts, the name and GC# of each cache, what you traded, and any notes you would like to make.

[+BigWhiteTruck]

Regarding 'paperless' caching using your pda, there are basically two ways to go if you are a Palm owner. You can download the cache pages to your unit using Cachemate or Plucker. Cachemate costs $8, Plucker's free.

 

Can you input coordinates into plucker and have plucker tell you which caches are the closest?

Can you hook your gps to the palm and have plucker navigate you to the cache?

You can't write your logs into plucker?

Can you mark caches found in plucker?

Can you sort caches in plucker?