Help using GPS phone

[+saharasnow]

Hello everyone,

 

We went venturing out to find our first Geocache today to no avail. We even tried a second one in Old Town Alexandria. I was using 1 of 3 different apps on my phone, GPS Traveller, Team GPS or Gps Info.

It seemed my phone coordinate & the maps I used did not match at all!!!!

I checked on computer when I got home & sure enough my current coords on phone & on computer for my house were near spot on!

So what did I do wrong while we were out? I'm relentless & think this will be a great family activity to just hiking but man how do you start when you have a bad experience your first time & convince family to go treasure hunting again?

 

Are there any tips tricks for using phone apps?

 

We were looking for coords. N 38° 49.260 W 077° 03.076 but when I parked close to intersection that Map said the cache was located & we walked both sides of the road till our numbers decreased, the most I got was N 38° 81.432W 077° 05.037. So I'm not sure what we did incorrect. Blog stated Monroe St & undeveloped land, trust me we walked till we hit fenceline & then retreated to find another cache.

 

 

N 38° 48.379 W 077° 02.811, again We drove up & down main street, but phone would say I was at N 38° 45.1435 W 077° 04.564... in the general area so I'd travel N till numbers went down but 2 miles N GPS still was only at N 38° 46, and we were way out of Old town area.

 

Any help would be appreciated, I think we may try again tomorrow afternoon.

 

Thanks Again,

Not given up quite so easy yet...

[+jeffbouldin]

What kind of phone do you have? And what app are you using?

[+dfx]

We were looking for coords. N 38° 49.260 W 077° 03.076 but when I parked close to intersection that Map said the cache was located & we walked both sides of the road till our numbers decreased, the most I got was N 38° 81.432 W 077° 05.037. So I'm not sure what we did incorrect. Blog stated Monroe St & undeveloped land, trust me we walked till we hit fenceline & then retreated to find another cache.

sounds like your phone is showing coordinates in decimal degrees format, so it's N 38.81432° and not N 38° 81.432'. converting N 38.81432° to degrees and minutes format gives N 38° 48.859'.

 

either switch the coordinate format on your phone over to degrees+minutes, or convert the coords you're looking for to decimal degrees before trying to find them.

 

generally, you should try to find some software for your phone that allows you to set an active waypoint at a certain location and then tells you distance and direction to that waypoint from your current location. trying to manually match up coords like that can be very painful.

[+patandkat]

If you are using a Blackberry, A couple real nice geocaching apps are Blackstar and Cachesense.

 

Blackstar is very basic, but also free.

 

Cachesense is a very affordable app, with a free trial, that is very effective to use when geocaching. It has a nifty compass feature as well as a radar for when you get close. It works well with Groundspeak and entering new targets is very easy. You can also log your finds, notes etc right on your Blackberry.

[+saharasnow]

Thank you all,

 

I have android & was using free apps like GPS Traveller, Info, Swiss Coords,

 

We actually went venturing out today & we found 3 of the caches without the GPS.... Good clues, maps, intersection & a fellow cacher helped.

 

We found all on our own but the nice cacher helped us as far as GPS phone & size we were really looking for.

We found 3 nanos, for our first 3 caches! LOL

The original location I was trying to find stumped even the cacher we meet & they'd been caching for 4 yrs!

so we moved on. When we found other 2 thou we looped back around & grabbed the one that alluded us at first.

 

[+jeffbouldin]

You will probably find that using a dedicated Geocaching app such as the Groundspeak app, GeoBeagle, C:Geo, or Cachemate will work better.