New Member Newbie Questions

[+J&JLoveVegas]

I have not been a paid member too long or a geocacher for that matter, I have a cpl questions, Do I only get 20 pocket queries in total?? , I am presently planing a driving trip from Vancouver BC to Deadwood South Dakota and find I will have to have several pocket queries to enable me to stop here and there for a few caches, and secondly I have been told there may be a way to do a pocket Querie that would follow a highway say for 30 miles and only 1 mile wide rather than a circumference pattern? is this so

 

Thank You

John

[+Team Perks]

Correct. You can only get 20 pocket queries in total (and no more than 5 can run per day). If you're covering a large distance, you will more than likely need to run several queries, but you can increase the "range" of your queries by being specific about what type of cache you want to find (I, for example, normally don't do multi-caches if I'm traveling, because I don't want to be chasing waypoints in the wrong direction to complete the find).

 

What you can't do is specify the "size" of the area you're querying to occur along a route. Your options are therefore to either 1) do a series of queries using coordinates along the route, or 2) just use the scrolling GC.com maps (available to premium members only) and hand-pick the caches you want to find in advance. The latter is more cumbersome, but I actually prefer that approach sometimes if I'm traveling far. That way I can review each cache individually and decide well in advance if it is going to be a good one to include (i.e., how far off the road is it, what kind of clothing will I need to wear to reach the cache area, etc.).

[+J&JLoveVegas]

Thank you for the info, as a newbie i made up several pocket queries while learning how to do it, just did not want to run out, I will have to be cautious in the future, another question, I read where some people get updates every week to their pocket queries, will they not run out of pocket query access quickly at that rate? I only asked to run the query once, should have I asked to rerun it weekly so I don't get out of date?

[+GrandpaKim]

Thank you for the info, as a newbie i made up several pocket queries while learning how to do it, just did not want to run out, I will have to be cautious in the future, another question, I read where some people get updates every week to their pocket queries, will they not run out of pocket query access quickly at that rate? I only asked to run the query once, should have I asked to rerun it weekly so I don't get out of date?

No, you won't run out of access. You can have 20 queries and you can run any 5 of them any day. For example, you could have 1 query that you run every day. That would leave you 4 queries that you could run every day.

[+New England n00b]

You can have 20 at any given time, 5 per day. Not 20 individual PQ's, that once they are used, they are gone forever,

[+briansnat]

secondly I have been told there may be a way to do a pocket Querie that would follow a highway say for 30 miles and only 1 mile wide rather than a circumference pattern? is this so

 

There is a way. I don't know the details, but it does take some computer savvy.

[+Team Cotati]

Correct.  You can only get 20 pocket queries in total (and no more than 5 can run per day).  If you're covering a large distance, you will more than likely need to run several queries, but you can increase the "range" of your queries by being specific about what type of cache you want to find (I, for example, normally don't do multi-caches if I'm traveling, because I don't want to be chasing waypoints in the wrong direction to complete the find).

 

What you can't do is specify the "size" of the area you're querying to occur along a route.  Your options are therefore to either 1) do a series of queries using coordinates along the route, or 2) just use the scrolling GC.com maps (available to premium members only) and hand-pick the caches you want to find in advance.  The latter is more cumbersome, but I actually prefer that approach sometimes if I'm traveling far.  That way I can review each cache individually and decide well in advance if it is going to be a good one to include (i.e., how far off the road is it, what kind of clothing will I need to wear to reach the cache area, etc.).

"Mile(s) Radius..." Would be an area I believe. Not an area blocking out the shape of a road with a width of 5 miles, but an area nonetheless. I've seen it posted in here that there might be a degree of technical research being performed as we type which might possibly address this issue in a user friendly manner. The availability of such a capability as far as I know is an unknown at this point in time.

Edited June 1, 2005 by Team cotati697

[+Markwell]

Caches along a route. This details one of the best solutions so far, but Jeremy has looked at implementing something on Geocaching.com directly. Nothing has been said lately. Look in this thread.

[+Munin]

I read where some people get updates every week to their pocket queries, will they not run out of pocket query access quickly at that rate?

Nope! The 20 PQ limit is on the total number of PQs you can have defined at any given time, not the total number of results that get mailed to you. You could select a query to run every day of the week, so you get seven results a week mailed to you, and you'd keep getting those results for as long as you wanted. (Well, at least as long as you renewed your membership each year. )

 

For example, you might have a couple of PQs that you run each week (or even several times a week) to retrieve caches near your home. Those would just count as one/two PQs out of the 20 total you can have at any given time. You might then set up another dozen PQs specific to your vacation trip so you could do what Markwell and Team Perks were describing for finding caches along your route. So for a little while, you might have 13-14 PQs defined, and you might have to split them up to run over several days to collect all the information for your trip (since you can only schedule a max of 5 PQs per day). After the trip is over, you can delete those dozen trip-specific PQs, and you'll once again have just 1-2 PQs defined, with room to define 18-19 other PQs to suit your needs.

[+Team Perks]

The 20 PQ limit is on the total number of PQs you can have defined at any given time, not the total number of results that get mailed to you.

Yeah, that's what I meant to say initially.

[+J&JLoveVegas]

Well thank you all, that was a lot of good information, my questions are answered, I always pay for a membership to a activity I am intewrested in so as long as I geocache I will be a paid member. Thank you all again

 

john

[+Team K1W1]

Maybe you can bribe one of your geocaching buddies to do a couple of pocket queries for you... I'd reckon two dozen beer or a 26'er on the return from your trip would do it.

 

Steve