My wish list of features geocaching would offer...

[+yummykaz]

I wish when I pull up a zip code list, it listed the co-ordinates too. This way I could print out a quickie list without the whole page of each cache. ( I think the pocket queries might do this, but mine is off or something).

 

I wish there was a way to blanket email people in my area( that say it is ok) ...for example.. I have a travel bug that was moved a mile CLOSER to me. I would love to be able to email people near my TB and beg them to go move it!

 

I wish there was a forum for just Texas.

 

I wish it would stop being hot or rainy..ok..I know you can't help me with that.

[+yummykaz]

lol...right after I whined here, I got a great notcie that someone picked up my TB...

 

thanks!

[+Pat Patterson]

This is a huge one for me. I havn't looked much and may actualy be able to <hope hope hope>

 

I'd like to be able to put 2 points in and have it list all the caches in a set corredor inbetween. Ie; home and edmonds wa where I was for a bbq. give me all the caches 10 miles left or rigth of that line. Then when I'm going on a trip I get a lat,long for my destination and then surch for all the caches that would be on the way.

 

Also when looking for nearest, check boxes for only east of here <or any other direction.>

 

Pat Patterson

Garmin 12XL

82CJ7 & 79F250

Herd of Turtles 4x4 club

[+GeoBond007]

If your in texas.Come on down and check out the local web site and join the fun. Check out the link at the bottom of my post. Hope to see you there.

 

GeoBond007

 

[+seneca]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Pat Patterson:

This is a huge one for me. I havn't looked much and may actualy be able to <hope hope hope>

 

I'd like to be able to put 2 points in and have it list all the caches in a set corredor inbetween. Ie; home and edmonds wa where I was for a bbq. give me all the caches 10 miles left or rigth of that line.

---

 

This is a big one for me too. That would be a feature definately worth 30 bucks US per year.

 

I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.

[lowracer]

quote:

---

I'd like to be able to put 2 points in and have it list all the caches in a set corredor inbetween. Ie; home and edmonds wa where I was for a bbq. give me all the caches 10 miles left or rigth of that line.

---

 

Mapquest offers something similar to this for their "driving directions" feature. Have Mapquest plot you the best route between anytown USA and anyothertown USA and they offer to tell you where the hotels and pizza parlors are within two miles of the highway as part of the trip plan.

 

This caches-along-route (CAR) feature could not be difficult to program considering that geocaching.com already knows the coordinates for many of the caches, and if Mapquest is able to tell you there's a pizza hut within 1 mile of mile marker xxx on any given highway, then someobody else knows the coordinates of the mile markers.

 

Let's hook these two databases together and vacationing will be a heck of a lot more fun.

[+elmo-fried]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Pat Patterson:

This is a huge one for me. I havn't looked much and may actualy be able to <hope hope hope>

 

I'd like to be able to put 2 points in and have it list all the caches in a set corredor inbetween. Ie; home and edmonds wa where I was for a bbq. give me all the caches 10 miles left or rigth of that line. Then when I'm going on a trip I get a lat,long for my destination and then surch for all the caches that would be on the way.

 

Also when looking for nearest, check boxes for only east of here <or any other direction.>

 

Pat Patterson

Garmin 12XL

82CJ7 & 79F250

Herd of Turtles 4x4 club

---

 

Pay $3/mo or $30/year (or whatever it is) and become a charter member. Then set up a PQ for your home zip for 500 unfound Geocaches.

 

Open the PQ GPX in ClayJar's Watcher and filter for the direction you want to go (I believe you can specify a box now as well):

http://www.clayjar.com/

 

Use Babel to convert the PQ GPX to whatever mapping program you want so you can visually display it:

http://gpsbabel.sourceforge.net/

 

The member-only PocketQuery feature is really all you need from GC.com, as there are so many offline tools that can process the data contained within them.

 

Jason Roysdon

jason.roysdon.net

[+RuffRidr]

quote:

---

Originally posted by elmo-fried:

The member-only PocketQuery feature is really all you need from GC.com, as there are so many offline tools that can process the data contained within them.

 

Jason Roysdon

http://jason.roysdon.net/

 

The only problem with this is that you are relying on a 3rd party site or product to be around forever. What happens if one of these developers decides to quit developing Geocaching related software and pulls the downloads off of their site? Hopefully this won't happen, but as we've now seen with Dan's Stats page, it can. The best solution, in my opinion, is for GC.com to add these kinds of features into the fold. Make it a premium feature, or an add on, I don't care.

 

--RuffRidr

[+HappyFrog (& gang)]

I wish that when I put PocketQueries in that I can say N, E, W, or S from the coordinates for caches. This way if there is a physical barrier such as a mountain that I don't want to go over, or I don't wish to go more distance farther N, E, W, or S then the coordinates I that I listed this way I don't get the other caches.

 

HappyFrog

[+Team Og Rof A Klaw]

Sent this one in yesterday... Immediate notification of new caches in my area, by email. Maybe gatewayed to a pager or instant messaging system for the truly obsessed.

 

____________________________

- Team Og Rof A Klaw

All who wander are not lost.

[Micqn]

I got an idea! Get somebody to write the code and submit it to Admin and HQ. I bet they could take it to the next step a lot faster.

 

Plays With Matches.

[+blindleader]

Doesn't this thread belong in the Geocaching.com Discussion Forum?

[+parkrrrr]

quote:

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Originally posted by RuffRidr:

The only problem with this is that you are relying on a 3rd party site or product to be around forever. What happens if one of these developers decides to quit developing Geocaching related software and pulls the downloads off of their site?

---

That's really only something you need to fear from commercial, shareware, or other closed-source software. Even if Robert decides he's tired of GPSBabel, the source code is out there and unencumbered by onerous copyright and licensing restrictions, so someone else could pick up where he left off. There are probably enough people who have copies of the source that even if gpsbabel.sourceforge.net were to disappear into a black hole, the source would survive.

 

Speaking of GPSBabel, the latest beta includes a filter that can identify the caches that fall within a specified distance of a specified route. How to specify the routes is still something of an open question, but there are various methods available. Personally, I use DeLorme Street Atlas 2003 to create my route files and then use GPSBabel to do the filtering (The latest version of GPSBabel includes the code from my SARoute program) but it should also be able to work with routes in GPX format or in various Magellan formats. It might even work with MapSource routes, though that hasn't been tested very thorougly.

 

The hard part of all of this is getting the actual coordinates for a large number of caches. As of now, finding the parameters you need to create Pocket Queries for the right areas is still something of a black art.

 

[robertlipe]

quote:

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Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Even if Robert decides he's tired of GPSBabel, the source code is out there and unencumbered by onerous copyright and licensing restrictions, so someone else could pick up where he left off.

---

 

That's all absolutely true and absolutely the reason I picked the license I did. If I get killed tomorrow on some terrain 5 cache hunt, the code goes on. If there's some feature that you MUST have you're free to either add it yourself or bribe someone else to do it _as long as you obey the terms of the GPL_. (Try asking your favorite closed-source organization for a copy of the source so you can change it.)

 

quote:

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It might even work with MapSource routes, though that hasn't been tested very thorougly.

---

 

There's a guy working on Mapsource route support in GPSBabel, but no code has been seen yet.

 

quote:

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As of now, finding the parameters you need to create Pocket Queries for the right areas is still something of a black art.

---

 

Yep. And even if you split the difference and had merely a loc (as you suggested in another thread) there's not a way to get a PQ that contains just those selected caches.

 

Without the cooperation of geocaching.com, this is likely to remain a difficult problem to solve well in the general case. (And if geocaching.com would like to cooperate with a programmer that's willing to tackle this, they should contact me...)

[+trippy1976]

quote:

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I wish when I pull up a zip code list, it listed the co-ordinates too. This way I could print out a quickie list without the whole page of each cache. ( I think the pocket queries might do this, but mine is off or something).

---

 

You can show lat/lon in watcher. It just occurred to me that I've never printed anything with watcher But yeah... watcher will do this with a PQ. And if you have a PQ, you have the coords in your GPS and the GCNum is on the listing... you're all set in that case.

 

--------

trippy1976 - Team KKF2A

Assimilating golf balls - one geocache at a time.

[+parkrrrr]

quote:

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Originally posted by robertlipe:

quote:

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It might even work with MapSource routes, though that hasn't been tested very thorougly.

---

 

There's a guy working on Mapsource route support in GPSBabel, but no code has been seen yet.

---

True, but thanks to the sieve-like nature of the current .mps support (it lets just about anything through) you can actually read .mps routes and write them to arc files. It's definitely not right, but it does seem to work. Of course, I only tested it with one route file, and I'm trusting the person who sent it to me to have sent me a file that really was a route file, but there it is.

 

[+Doc-Dean]

Would someone mind posting a "walk through" on how to do this??

 

---------------------------------------------------

Free your mind and the rest will follow

[+parkrrrr]

Walkthrough

 

Okay, not quite a walkthrough, because your situation will vary somewhat, and I'm not going to tell you how to do obvious stuff like change directories and make sure gpsbabel is in your path and so on; consult your local DOS guru for that.

 

I use Street Atlas 2003 to create my routes. If you use some other program, parts of this will be different.

 

First, I create a route in Street Atlas by telling it my starting point and ending point and so on. If you can't do that, give up now.

 

Now, I go find the route I just created in my c:delorme docsnavigation directory. It'll have a name that ends in .anr. (Topo USA will have route names that end in .rtd, and earlier versions of Street Atlas can export to the ".rte" format. Either of those will work too.)

 

I copy that file to a temporary directory, where I also copy all of the GPX files that cover the area I'll be traveling through (getting those is difficult; good luck.) Now, you need to get to a command prompt (what some people still call a DOS prompt) in that directory.

 

We need to convert the .anr file into something the GPSBabel arc filter can understand. If you have built GPSBabel from the CVS source, or if Robert has released a new beta since I wrote this, you can do this:

 

gpsbabel -r -i saroute -f route.anr -o arc -F route.txt

 

"route.anr" is the name of the route file. If yours has spaces in it, either rename it or remember to put it in quotes. This creates a file called "route.txt" that, were you to look at it in notepad, contains a list of coordinates. If you were starting with another kind of route, you'd replace the "saroute" with whatever GPSBabel calls the route type you started with. If it's a mapsource route, leave off the -r (for now; when babel has real route support for mapsource, you'll want to put it back.)

 

Now we're ready to find some caches:

 

gpsbabel -i gpx -f 1111.gpx -f 2222.gpx -f 3333.gpx -x arc,file=route.txt,distance=10 -o gpx -F filtered.gpx

 

Now filtered.gpx will contain all caches from 1111.gpx, 2222.gpx, and 3333.gpx that were within 10 miles of the route in route.txt.

 

The README for GPSBabel has more details on the parameters you can specify to the arc filter, as well as the file format it expects.

 

[robertlipe]

quote:

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Originally posted by Warm Fuzzies - Fuzzy:

 

if Robert has released a new beta since I wrote this, you can do this:

---

 

_poof_ "...and there was."

 

I just put up a baby bouncing beta babel at http://gpsbabel.sourceforge.net that includes this logic.

 

Enjoy.

[+Pat Patterson]

Thanks for the walk thro. while within my dos skill set. I started with dos 3.3 . I don't have the softwear of which you speek. I'll acuire that and give it a try.

 

 

Thanks again. BTW is the practical aplication of that easy and fast? or is it a pain in the @ss?

 

Pat Patterson

Garmin 12XL

82CJ7 & 79F250

Herd of Turtles 4x4 club

[+bigredmed]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Pat Patterson:

 

I'd like to be able to put 2 points in and have it list all the caches in a set corredor inbetween. Ie; home and edmonds wa where I was for a bbq. give me all the caches 10 miles left or rigth of that line. Then when I'm going on a trip I get a lat,long for my destination and then surch for all the caches that would be on the way.

 

---

 

This would be cool. I think that to publish the coords of the caches on the My Cache page zip code search would be a great modification to the current page. I don't use the waypoints that are published and don't want to now that I am using Linux. Substituting the real coords for the waypoints would be GREAT!

 

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nebraskache/

[+parkrrrr]

quote:

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Originally posted by Pat Patterson:

Thanks again. BTW is the practical aplication of that easy and fast? or is it a pain in the @ss?

---

It's easy and fast if you have the Pocket Queries to cover the area your route covers. Otherwise, you'll spend some time coming up with queries that give you the caches you need and then waiting for them to arrive.

 

[+Snoogans]

Corridor or point to point cache searches.

 

A forum where I don't have to worry about being "On Topic," and where I can just visit with fellow geocachers about anything. (Yea right. FAT CHANCE.)

 

Sngans

Sacred cows make the best hamburger....Mark Twain.