Postcodes

[Guest weenantie]

OK........I have been in Texas for a month...and did geocaching nearly everyday....we could find out the distance and the direction(nsew) of caches from the list.....why can't I do that here in Scotland.....or am I doing something wrong.....I can't find where to put my postcode.....HELP

[Guest PHREDD]

Is a post code necessary?.

I thought the idea of the sport was to find a location with only a set of co-ordinates to go by and the occasional use of a map.

Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick, I hope so.

Phredd,

 

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Phredd

[Guest JasonW]

weenantie

 

You can't do that because there's no freely available database of UK Postcode<->Latitude/Longitude data - your best bet is to use lats & longs, which you can find for places quite easily either here at the NIMA Geonames Query Page (Worldwide) or here at the Ordnance Survey (GB only - not Northern Ireland) (Type in the name of the place as if you were going to buy a map, and it gives you the sheet number the place is on and the Lat/Long in degrees & minutes)

 

Hope this helps you a bit.

 

Edited to put the NIMA URL right - they changed it again

 

[This message has been edited by JasonW (edited 18 November 2001).]

[Guest timp]

Are we missing the point of this question ?

 

I think Weenantie is asking how to search the site for caches near home with the distances etc shown on the cache listing page.

 

If this is so, Just take your coordinates using your GPS and enter these on the "Hide and Seek a Cache" page.

 

Once you arrive at the search results add the page to your favorites ready for next time.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Tim

[Guest LazyLeopard]

quote:

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Originally posted by PHREDD:

Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick,

---

 

I guess the idea was to find the nearby caches by entering a postcode rather than lat/long. In the US it seems the databases that turn Zip to lat/long are freely availabe. Here you'd have to pay the GPO (or whatever they're called this week) a bundle of notes to use theirs...

 

Sure could be tricky tryingto find out postcodes for (at least some of) the actual caches

 

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Purrs... LazyLeopard

[Guest LazyLeopard]

quote:

---

Originally posted by PHREDD:

Maybe I have the wrong end of the stick,

---

 

I guess the idea was to find the nearby caches by entering a postcode rather than lat/long. In the US it seems the databases that turn Zip to lat/long are freely availabe. Here you'd have to pay the GPO (or whatever they're called this week) a bundle of notes to use theirs...

 

Sure could be tricky tryingto find out postcodes for (at least some of) the actual caches

 

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Purrs... LazyLeopard