Identify caches at a specified distance

[+BaSHful]

I would like to identify caches that are more than 110 and less than 115 miles from my home co-ordinates. Any suggestions for how to do this? I am a premium member and a GSAK user.

[+pppingme]

"IF" you have all caches within 115 miles, the gsak filter is easy, on the first page, choose the "between" option next to distance.

 

The tricky part will be getting all the .gpx's into gsak, gs doesn't give an easy way to make a PQ with these options.

[+Great Scott!]

Create pockets queries with a radius of 115 miles from your home coordinates. If there are more than 1000 caches in the radius. use date ranges and make multiple PQs.

Add the PQs to a GSAK database.

Sort the database by Miles.

Delete the caches less than 110 miles from your home coordinates.

[+BaSHful]

The filtering I had already sussed out.

 

Multiple PQs would work but you would need a lot of them and this would probably be very tedious.

 

In the absence of a silver bullet I will adopt this approach: When I know I will be going on a trip more than 110 miles from home, I will use GoogleEarth to identify the spot on my route that is 112.5 miles from home. I create a PQ on that spot and drop the results into GSAK where I can filter for the exact band I'm interested in.

 

And all this so that I might eventually qualify for "Challenge cache - The Well Travelled Cacher GB" (http://coord.info/GC3CZ5H).

[+Walts Hunting]

Silver bullet is.

 

Use any appropriate mapping program and draw a circle 112.5 mines out from your center. Save that route as a GPX out KML. Submit it as a route with a distance from as 2.5 miles. If you run into the cache number limit divide it up.

[+ngrrfan]

What I did was.....

 

I found a macro for GSAK for The Well Traveled Cacher challenge.

Then using Street Atlas 2003 I drew 2 shaded circles on the map, one radius at the minimum mileage and the other radius at the maximum mileage. The portion between these two rings is the target area.

Then looking at this map I started looking for towns and cities and told Groundspeak to go to those areas. Then I would look at what caches were in the area, pick the caches that were 2/2 or less and put them in a bookmark list. Run a PQ on the bookmark list, open in GSAK, export to whatever type of file the mapping program uses and load the caches into that program. Now you can see where they really lie and see clumps of them and plan road trips accordingly. You should notice that most "clumps" will fall along major highways and interstates, although there are exceptions.

[+BaSHful]

I have created a route between two locations in Google Earth, saved in as a .kmz file to my computer, uploaded it to the GeoCaching web site and then created a PQ based on it. So far so good.

 

However, I have not the faintest idea how to achieve the circular route you suggest. Please can you explain how this can be done or point me to a tutorial.

[+ngrrfan]

I have created a route between two locations in Google Earth, saved in as a .kmz file to my computer, uploaded it to the GeoCaching web site and then created a PQ based on it. So far so good.

 

However, I have not the faintest idea how to achieve the circular route you suggest. Please can you explain how this can be done or point me to a tutorial.

I use Street Atlas 2003 as the mapping program. With it I am able to add layers to the base map and on one layer draw a circle with a radius of 100 miles (for an example) and use my home coords as the center of the circle.

Then I enable another layer and draw a circle with a radius of 120 miles (for example) and shade it another color. The area between the two rings is the "target" search area for caches.

 

I came up with this on my own, using the software tools/programs that I already have. So to do it my way the first thing you need is a copy of Street Atlas 2003 which you can probably find on eBay.

[+Walts Hunting]

It takes a little work but here is how I have done it in Mapsource. Center the center of the circle on the screen with the zoom back far enough to draw the distance in all four directions. Use Direct routing and click on the center and go out the distance you want to the north. Repeat until you have 8 lines (every 45 degrees) extending out to the radius. Then start by click on any one of the ends and draw the circle. It won't be perfect but by increasing the distance from the line in the route query you will cover it. Delete the 8 lines and you have the route to save for use.

 

After getting the pq back drop it in GSAK and do two filters to delte those to close and to far and yo ugot it. You also might try a posting in the GSAK forum. It is hard to believe that someone hasn't done some macros that would help.

[+BaSHful]

Been sidetracked with other things. Thanks for the responses but pragmatically the approach I set out in my post of 03 March 2012 - 03:40 AM will meet my needs as I'm only going to want to do this a few times.