Pocket Query strategies needed

[+Boundertom]

I need suggestions from someone more experienced and/or more clever than myself. I am going to Oregon in September and hope to do lots of caching. There are currently 1093 caches in Oregon, so obviously, multiple queries must be run in order to retrieve all the caches in the state. I will not be going to the Portland Metro area (trying to stay away from people!), but might end up anywhere else in the state. How would you set up the queries? I would like to avoid overlap of results, but this seems impossible. My GPSr's will only hold 500 waypoints, so I can't load them all in at once anyway. I was thinking of doing 4 queries, east, central, southwest, northwest. I would have to pick an appropriate origin and radius for each area. Any other ideas? Finally, if you do a query, and ask for 500 results, what happens if there are more than 500 caches meeting your criteria? What ones don't you get?

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

Boundertom

[Jeremy]

Definitely work from a point of origin, since you will receive cache listings in the order of distance. after 500 you just stop at xx miles/kilometers from your origin.

 

Reduce your number of queries by filtering the results. Virtual caches not your interest? Lose them. Level 5 caches? Gone. And so on.

 

Review the map of the state and see the concentration of caches. Choose one close to the center and use that as the point of origin.

 

I've been considering how to do this with large results. Possibly breaking out a large result into 3 files of 500 caches may work, but I'll have to figure out some functionality.

 

Lastly, if you plan on moving around to different regions, setting up your queries beforehand and downloading them for each day and region you are in may work. Of course this would require access to a computer.

 

Jeremy

 

Jeremy Irish

Groundspeak - The Language of Location

[+Olar]

Not knowing what resources you have available I'll describe what I would do if it were me visiting Oregon.

Looking at the Oregon cache map it appears that a large majority of caches are in the Western half of the State. I would create a query with a radius large enough to cover as much of the Eastern half as possible. Then maybe 3 queries based on radius to get balance. I would open these 4 with Geobuddy which is set up to eliminate duplicate waypoints and then merge the four to make one large Oregon file.

This file then would get saved to EasyGPS and to Microsoft Streets & Trips as a pushpin set.

It sounds like you prefer rural and/or wilderness caches so I would have made my queries download a terrain rating of say 2 or higher. That should cut-down on a lot of urban caches. I would also be a little picky about cache type.

In EasyGPS start deleting caches you don't want by identifying the urban ones on the map.

I'll bet you could get it down to less than 500.

Good Luck, Olar

 

[+mrcpu]

What I did for Canada is to do my query by date. I had to do a query for 2000, 2001 and 3 for 2002 (Jan,Feb,Mar then Apr,May,Jun, then Jun July).

 

The big tip is to watch the number of caches returned. If the number is near 500 (494 for example) you need to split the query into a smaller date range.

 

Cheers,

 

Rob

Mobile Cache Command

[+Boundertom]

This got me thinking of yet another "improvement" for the pocket query. I am SURE you want to hear that!

How about if you could query for a selected state, and then be able to specify results N,S,E, or W of a selected latitude or longitude?

This would be a lot cleaner it seems, than selecting points of origin and appropriate radius. This could ensure full coverage of an area/ state, and eliminate duplicates. Knowing absolutely nothing about programming, this seems like it wouldn't be too hard to do?

Anyway, thanks again for your great work!

[+Boundertom]

This got me thinking of yet another "improvement" for the pocket query. I am SURE you want to hear that!

How about if you could query for a selected state, and then be able to specify results N,S,E, or W of a selected latitude or longitude?

This would be a lot cleaner it seems, than selecting points of origin and appropriate radius. This could ensure full coverage of an area/ state, and eliminate duplicates. Knowing absolutely nothing about programming, this seems like it wouldn't be too hard to do?

Anyway, thanks again for your great work!

[+Boundertom]

I actually have all the software you mentioned, I am just pretty shaky about using it. With your suggestions though, I have merged 2 files in Geobuddy, and created a pushpin set in Streets and Trips. I like the way the pushpin sets work in Streets and Trips. I will just have to play with things some more. I think this method, combined with carefull querying will do the job for me. Thanks again!