Generating a large area PQ

[+Rick-N-Cyn]

We live near a big city with over 1500 caches in the surrounding area. We use the official Geocaching app on our smartphones and use GSAK to load caches into the car GPS. Here's the problem: Cell coverage is spotty in some areas so I would like to keep a big offline database of all of these caches. I set up two pocket queries of 1000 caches each- one centered in the northwest part of the area and the other centered in the southeast part of the area, with lots of overlap in between. I thought it was working OK, but then I discovered that many "premium member only" caches are not showing up in either query even though they are near the center of one of the search areas. There is a mention of this anomaly in some of the other threads in this forum. My "band-aid" for this problem was to create a third PQ for "members only" caches centered in the main search area. This seems to be working OK, but it's a sloppy way to do it. Am I missing something here? Is there a better way?

 

Thanks for any thoughts on this.

 

-Rick (and Cynthia)

[+webscouter.]

In the past prior to the ability to grab caches via the API in GSAK the preferred method to grab caches was to set up PQ's by date placed.

 

In fact there is a GSAK macro to help you determine the date ranges if you have the caches loaded into your GSAK database already.

 

http://gsak.net/board/index.php?showtopic=2777&st=0entry169280

 

This should help you out.

[+Lieblweb]

My husband also uses GSAK and grabs PQ's via date placed.....

[AZcachemeister]

Hi Rick-N-Cyn,

 

I have a 'complete' database of all the caches in AZ, and I use the 'date placed' PQ method to produce and maintain it.

It takes 24 PQs at this time.

If you had such a database, you could load all the waypoints as POI into your Auto GPSr, and you could upload various files (.gpx) to an ANDROID phone.

If you have iPhones, you would be out of luck. It is very difficult (impossible) to upload a file to it...everything needs to be done online (there may have been recent developments in this area, though).

 

Very odd that PMO caches aren't showing up in your PQs, though...I guess I have (so far) missed out on that discussion.

[+Markwell]

"Are available to everyone" being checked is a criteria for excluding PMO caches

[+Rick-N-Cyn]

Hi Rick-N-Cyn,

 

I have a 'complete' database of all the caches in AZ, and I use the 'date placed' PQ method to produce and maintain it.

It takes 24 PQs at this time.

If you had such a database, you could load all the waypoints as POI into your Auto GPSr, and you could upload various files (.gpx) to an ANDROID phone.

If you have iPhones, you would be out of luck. It is very difficult (impossible) to upload a file to it...everything needs to be done online (there may have been recent developments in this area, though).

 

Very odd that PMO caches aren't showing up in your PQs, though...I guess I have (so far) missed out on that discussion.

Yep- we have Android phones. What I don't get about basing a PQ on "date placed" is that once the caches are in the main database they will not get updated again.......or am I missing something?

 

BTW- It's not ALL PMO caches that are not showing up- only a few of them are missing. I understand that this sometimes happens when the number of caches for the PQ is set very high.

[+Rick-N-Cyn]

"Are available to everyone" being checked is a criteria for excluding PMO caches

Glad you mentioned that. Nothing is checked in that section. Could that have any bearing on the problem?

[+Markwell]

Seriously - check out my PQ page about criteria:

 

http://markwell.us/pq.htm