More Questions

[leviathan]

Thanks to all of you who answered my last post.However, I have more questions.

 

1) Are these caches found by going from waypoint to waypoint?

 

2) I have a Garmin eTrex vista, and from what I can gather from the manual the only way to enter coordinates is as waypoints, am I missing something?

 

3) Do you use the coordinates at the upper left of the cache description page?

 

4) Also in that upper left area it says "use waypoint: GC3EA8. What do you do with this info.?

 

5) What is this "EasyGPS for Groundspeak" business?

 

Thanks,

leviathan

[+Renegade Knight]

1) No, you go the the wapoint that is the cache itself. Then you pick another cache and use that waypoint as a guide. Waypoint to waypoint is following a route. You might use a route on backroads to guide you in to the cache waypoint.

 

2) All coordinates are stored as waypoints. The waypoint has a name so you can tell that coordinate from all the others. All Geocaching waypoints start with GC. A waypoint is nothing more than what we are calling a single coordinate location. The waypoint can be named "Car" for example when you mark your car before a long hike.

 

3) Yes. Or download the Waypoint into EasyGPS and then upload that into your Vista. This saves time and typo's.

 

4) Thats the name of the waypoint. If you upload a list of them into your Vista the one you want to find for that specific cache is named that.

 

5) Easygps is a program for dowloading waypoints from geocaching.com and uploading them inot your GPs so you don't have to spend hourse typing them and making typo's. The Groundspeak version is already set up to work with Groundspeak waypoints. In other words it's set up in DDD MM.MMM format and WGS84 which can cause you problems if you are not using the same datum and format.

 

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Wherever you go there you are.

[+Kite and Hawkeye]

All coordinates stored in your GPS are called waypoints. It's just a handy term. If there's more than one waypoint involved (like, if they give you parking coordinates, then the cache coordinates), you can go from waypoint to waypoint to find the cache. Usually, though, there's only one waypoint (set of coordinates) provided: that of the cache itself. Unless you're using the cable and some GPS-related computer software, you input coordinates by going to 'mark a waypoint,' then editing those coordinates to match the ones given for the cache (at the top of the cache page, usually, but read the cache description because occasionally they'll say "the cache isn't really at those coordinates..." and explain something more complicated). Uploading coordiantes with the cable is a LOT easier and faster, but if you haven't got a cable and/or would rather just get out and find a cache or two before playing with the software, you can manually enter them via the "mark" function.

 

When you enter/mark a waypoint, your gps will automatically assign it a name. Something inspiring like "001." After a few of these, you will probably be unable to remember what's what. Since you have six characters to play with, and you want to be able to label the waypoints more clearly, the geocaching site makes up a waypoint name -- that's the "Use waypoint GCxxxx" thing. Personally, we don't find GC67X3 any easier to remember than 001, so we make up abbreviated cache names that will fit in six characters and actually mean something to us. Our "Frogs On Guard" cache would abbreviate to "FROGOG" in our system. This is completely personal preference. You can call the cache waypoint anything you want.

 

And I don't know a thing about EasyGPS for Groundspeak, so I can't help you there. Hawkeye's tweaked some linux software for us to be able to download, but I just nod and smile a lot while he does it.

 

quote:

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Originally posted by leviathan:

Thanks to all of you who answered my last post.However, I have more questions.

 

1) Are these caches found by going from waypoint to waypoint?

 

2) I have a Garmin eTrex vista, and from what I can gather from the manual the only way to enter coordinates is as waypoints, am I missing something?

 

3) Do you use the coordinates at the upper left of the cache description page?

 

4) Also in that upper left area it says "use waypoint: GC3EA8. What do you do with this info.?

 

5) What is this "EasyGPS for Groundspeak" business?

 

Thanks,

leviathan

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