Geocaching Withdrawals...

We had a crazy week at work. Our national auditors were in town Monday through Thursday. Overall, the audit went great. We had no system findings and only six observations. I don't think I can recall a time when we have no system findings. The department I manage had no observations and no findings. My group did an excellent job and I was very proud of them. The only bad thing was that the days were long and I had no chance to even think about caching.

No problem, there is always the weekend ! Well, if it were not pouring down rain, that might be the case. I am not going to complain much, though. We have a serious rainfall deficiet right now and we need every drop. I think we have been under red flag warnings and burn bans since the start of the year.

If the forecast holds, I may be able to do some caching tomorrow. It might be a bit muddy since it has been raining since mid-day yesterday. I'll take it though !

Saturday....

Mike and I had to go into work today. We have our national auditors coming in next week and an important computer upgrade this weekend. We worked about 2 hours today and were able to get out and cache for a while.

My intent was to see how my Blackberry worked out in the field compared to my Palm TX. Unfortunately, I think my Palm TX was the clear winner when it comes to caching! Although I felt the Blackberry did okay, the Palm definitely had a leg up because the Palm TX shows pictures and maps where the Blackberry is text only when it comes to caches.

Edit- Sorry about all the typos! Also, I should add that I was on the WAP site for gc.com so pictures will not show up. If I go to the full site with the Blackberry, the photos do show but the pages are hard to navigate. I am still looking at options to make the best of caching on the Blackberry. If I do stick with a Palm, I will probably sell the TX and get an older, lower end Palm. I don't need all the features of the TX just for caching.

Oops....

Sorry I never posted a follow-up to my Blackberry post. We had intended to go caching last Sunday, but it didn't happen. I felt like I was coming down with a chest cold or something so I opted to stay home and rest. We are going to get out this weekend, though. I'm not sure how much caching we will get to do as we have to work, but we will get some done. I'd really like to hit the 100 mark. Surely, we can find 7 caches close to work :D

Blackberry 7290...

I just got a Blackberry 7290 yesterday. How much that has to do with geocaching is yet to be seen. I really never intended or wanted to get one, but when your boss "recommends" that you get one, you do as told. At least, that is the way things work in my life! I have to admit, it is very convienient to get my mail instantly and not have to worry about logging on to the work server to check my mail all the time. Since I am a gadget guy, I have spent the last 24 hour reading reviews, playing with software, and learning about my new toy. I've even logged into and bookmarked the WAP geocaching.com site to see how thiat works. As long as you have the CG number available on your GPS (as I do), it seems like it would be very nice to access cache information this way. I don't know if the Blackberry will replace my Palm TX yet, though. I do know that I probably won't be carrying the Palm to work anymore. After I got everything synced up with the BES, all my Calendar and Task items were on the Blackberry; not to mention all my Contacts. In other words, my brain is now available on two devices and I would rather just carry one of them. The fact that one also is a phone and has a QWERTY keyboard makes it the easy choice. Anyone need a Palm TX?

What I do need to determine is if the Blackberry can replace the Palm when it comes to caching. It is very nice to be able to download all the cache info to my Palm and have it available at a whim when I am out caching. I will probably take both devices out tomorrow and see how the Blackberry performs when it comes to pulling cache info. I am concerned about signal availability while in the woods and remote locations. What I will probably end up doing is selling my TX and replacing it with an older Palm like the M505 as I no longer need the wireless and bluetooth capability of the TX.

Oh, did I mention that work also bought me a bluetooth headset? I got a Motorola H585 Bluetooth headset to use with my Blackberry. I have to admit, it is pretty cool. The Blackberry is a bit of a brick and it is a pain to have to use as a phone. It looks like you are talking into a calculator. The headset is great in that you just leave the phone holstered and press a button on the headset to answer. So far, I am really impressed at how well the set-up works. I'll let you know how it does out geocaching tomorrow!

Hiking....

In the past, I have mentioned hiking to find a cache. Today, I truly had to hike for a couple of caches! Mike picked me up today at about 1030. There was a cache close by that I have wanted to try for some time. I put it off because it was quite a walk to retrieve this cache. Today, we decided to give it a go. We arrived at the Turkey Mountain Wildlife Preserve at about 10:50. We started our hike and immediately realized that we were going to have to climb Turkey Mountain to access the cache. I'm a bit out of shape so it took us about 45-55 minutes to reach the cache. Once we were there, it took another 10 minutes to locate the cache. The cache was "The Tulsa Thanksgiving Cache" and it is one of the older caches in our area. I was excited to find this cache as it is not your usual park and grab cache. We didn't take anything from the cache, but we did add to it.

While we were in the park, we decided to go ahead and grab the other cache located there. The cache was "CTF VI". This cache was MUCH more difficult to access. To reach the first cache, we had to ascend about 270 feet and walk .5 miles. This cache required another .3 of a mile and a very steep descent. It also required some fancy foot work to reach as there was a narrow ledge with a big drop if you lost your footing. Mike quickly retrieved the cache and brought it to a safe place to inspect. He lost his footing once and scared the crap out of me....he said he did it on purpose but I don't know !! After that, be has .9 of a mile hike out. These caches are my favorite, so far. It was truly a beauitful location and it provided some great exercise. Here is a map of our hike.

Once this was done, we headed to Wendy's to grab a bite of lunch. After that long hike, it was great to sit down and eat! Oh, another thing, today was the first time out with my new fanny pack. Yesterday, I was browsing online and discovered that The Bass Pro Shop had RedHead fanny packs on sale for nearly 50% off. I ran over to our local shop and grabbed one for $14.88. It has over 400 CIs of storage and two 21oz water bottles. Last night I washed out the bottles and filled them with water. I then stuck them in the fridge. I was SO glad to have them with me today on that long hike. It is also very nice to have a lot of storage. The thing has multiple compartments and I was able to organize all my stuff before caching today.

We ended up finding 4 more caches today bringing my total number of caches to 93. I shoud break 100 over the next week! I hope everyone has a wonderful week! I'll post soon.

My Apologies....

for not posting lately !! I had one heck of a week this week. After taking six days of vacation and nearly dying from the flu (not really, just felt like it) I ended up WAY behind at work. You take that plus the fact that I had 25 meetings this last week and I haven't had any time to post. I'm always amazed that I can get any work done at work with the number of meetings I have to attend. Amazingly, most of our meetings at work are productive. Now, I just need to figure out how to make all of them productive or eliminate the one's that aren't.

Enough about work. Let's talk about geocaching! Mike and I are going caching tomorrow. Robert is out of town and cannot join us. Tomorrow is supposed to be a wonderful 72 degrees and partly cloudy. Sounds like a great day to geocache to me. :) I'm setting at 87 finds at the moment. Yes, that means I only need 13 caches to hit 100! We are hitting the road at 10:30 in the morning, so I intend to hit a milestone tomorrow. I would be thrilled to hit 100. That would be 100 finds in less than 5 months. Not a record by any means, but it would thrill me, none the less.

I'll let you know how it went tomorrow evening. Hope everyone has a great weekend and finds lots of caches !

Flu Season?.....

Sorry I haven't posted in a while! I went on vacation for a week and when I returned, I didn't feel so hot. In fact, I've been home since the 27th of March and have yet to completely unpack from my trip! In spite of the fact that I got a flu shot for the first time in my life, I seem to have got the flu for the first time in my life (at least, that I know of). I'm not knocking getting a flu shot, I just happened to get exposed to a strain that wasn't covered by the vaccine. Today is the first day that I've actually felt like getting on the computer and blogging. I still feel a little under the weather, but I am SO much better than I was just four days ago.

First and foremost, if you are interested in the history of geocaching, head over to Adventures in Geocaching and check out John's two part article. It is a great read on the history of the sport that has captivated many! John has a great blog and if your not a regular reader, you should be :)

Second, I's like to tell you about my caching experience in Lubbock while I was on vacation. I always enjoy visiting my family in Texas. This time, I wanted to incorperate my hobby with my trip. Using my previously discussed method, I prepared for my trip. I had all the caches within 5 miles of my route downloaded to my GPSr and my Palm TX. Unfortunately, I got a late start leaving Tulsa and did not get to cache on the way down to Lubbock. Much of the trip was in the dark and I'm not to the point where I am comfortable caching after dark yet. I wasn't too worried as there was always the trip back.

My plan was to cache heavily on Friday the 24th as most of my family would be at work and I would have little to do anyways. Friday morning rolled around and my father woke my up. I knew something was wrong as he was not dressed for work and it was already 08:30. I got up and got dressed and wandered to the kitchen. Dad explained that Mom had been up sick all night. It looked like she had a bad stomach virus or something along those lines. Fortunately, both my brother and I have an extensive medical background. My brother is an RN active in emergency medicine. We have him come by and we were able to start an IV on mom and get some phenergan on board via the IV. Through the day we infused a couple of bags of fluid and I gave her a couple more doses of phenergan. Needless to say, I didn't even try to go caching. The good news is that we kept her hydrated and was able to quickly recover. The next morning she was up cooking breakfast for us.

Dad wanted to see what this "geocaching thing" was all about so we loaded up the GPS and my PDA and hit the road Saturday morning. The first cache we went for was a couple of miles from my parent house and had not yet been found. There were a couple of DNFs so I wasn't too hopeful. After about twenty minutes, I coupld see that dad wasn't having very much fun so I decided to wrap it up and head for a cache that had a good history. This cache was out in the middle of a drainage area. It was a short walk through a prairie dog area to get to the cache. They were not happy to see us. Those things "barked" at us the whole time. I had no idea that prairie dogs had become so prevelant around Lubbock. When I was a kid growing up in Lubbock, it took some work to actually see prairie dogs. Now they are everywhere! I digress...My dad was the first to spot the likely hiding spot of the cache and he was right. I pulled the cache out and we looked through the swag and signed the log. we hiked back up to my truck and headed out to find the next cache about 1/2 a mile away. We were able to park about 100 foot from this cache. We got out and walked up to where the H2O was leading us. Again, we searched for about 20 minutes to no avail. Hmmm....this was a bit discouraging! We decided to try one more.

Off we went to locate "Western Progress". This cache had a recent history of finds so I was pretty sure we would locate it is it was there. This one was located in a drainage area as well and required a good walk around the retention pond to access. Actually, some people had driven right up to the cache, but one of the reasons I cache is for the exercise so we elected to walk. Like the other retention pond cache, we were able to quickly locate this cache and log our find. We had been gone about an hour at this point and I think both dad and I were anxious to go home and check on mom so we headed back after batting 500 for the day.

It's interesting how different caching is from one locale to another. Here in Tulsa, we are very saturated with caches. This is a good thing. In Lubbock, the caches are pretty spread out. I think it has a lot to do with the ability to hide caches. If you have ever been to Lubbock, you understand. There just are not as many opportunities to hide regular size caches as there are in Tulsa. A green ammo can would stick out like a sore thumb in most places. Another aspect that suprised me was how easy caching in Lubbock was. Here in Tulsa, I am used to pretty interesting terrain, fight thorns, and heavy undergrowth. In Lubbock, my experience was you are able to just walk right up to caches. The hider must be very capable to hide caches in these conditions.

Needless to say, I wasn't feeling well on my way home and didn't hit any caches on the way back. I have a lot of PTO built up already so I'm sure I will be going back to Lubbock soon. Hopefully, I will get to spend much more time caching on my next trip !! In the mean time, maybe if I feel good enough tomorrow, I will go caching.

Headed Southwest

Well, I'm headed to Lubbock tomorrow ! I'm not sure if I will get any caching done on the way down because I will end up leaving late. However, I do plan on some major caching once I get to Lubbock. My dad is working Friday, so I will be able to get out and cache most of the day Friday. I have also committed to taking my brother and my neices caching on Saturday.

If all else fails, I will cache my way home on Monday. I look forward to seeing my family and caching in Texas as much as I can !!

Return to Winter....

Wow, you never stop being amazed at Oklahoma weather ! I had hopes of getting out and geocaching this last weekend, in spite of the fact that there was a high percentage chance of rain. It's Oklahoma so if they are calling for a 100% chance of rain, chances are, it won't rain. Now, if there is only a slight chance....look out, it's coming a gully washer.

Well, they were right this time :( It has rained for three solid days now. Not that we didn't desperately need the rain, but that combined with the highs in the 40's definitely kept me indoors. All that said, some crazy people from SW Oklahoma came up for the TAG monthly meeting and found like 40 caches ! They are tougher than I.

On an even weirder note, it is supposed to snow tonight, tomorrow and Wednesday night. I don't think I've ever seen snow this late in the season here in the 13 years I've been here. Of course, it has yet to happen at this juncture.

I'm taking some vacation time later this week. I plan on heading southwest to visit my parents and brothers in Lubbock on Thursday. Of course, I plan on plotting an ARC and letting GSAK do it's thing. I probably won't do much caching on the way down, but once I get there, I will cache. I also plan on caching my way back to Tulsa. Hope everyone has a great week !!

Road Trip...

Well, not really. Road trip implies fun and this was a work trip. Not that I didn't have fun, I just didn't have as much fun as I would have if it had not been a work trip. Being that I only had time to do two caches in three days, I obviously was working too much. All that said, I drove down to Dallas Monday and returned to Tulsa today. I was determined to get a cache in Texas so that I could add another state to my map :D. Not to mention, I am a Native (yes, capitalized) Texan and it is a shame to be approaching 100 caches without a single Texas cache under my belt! I know, people get tired of how proud Texans can be but we can't help it. I can't, anyway. I spent the first 23 years of my life there. I would hope that most people are proud of their home and heritage.

The good news is that I won't hit 100 with only one Texas cache. I am returning to Texas next week on a true road trip to visit my family and I intend to do some serious caching around Lubbock. That reminds me, I need to run a Pocket Query for the area.

One good thing about this trip was that it gave me my first real opportunity to "cache along a route". As many post as you see on the geocaching forums about this topic, I assumed it was very difficult to do this. I couldn't have been more wrong. With the help of my already eastablished paperless method and a single website, it turned out to be quite painless. I had done some research and knew that I needed to use the ARC method and GSAK to isolate caches close to my route of travel. I also needed to have the caches along my route downloaded to GSAK.

I'll start with getting the caches loaded to GSAK. The easiest method I was able to find was to do PQs using zipcodes along my route. In other words, I looked at a map and wrote down the towns along the route. I googled the town names for zipcodes. For example, my search on google would be "Atoka zipcode". After gathering the zipcodes, I created pocket queries using these zipcodes that overlapped each other by setting the PQ search radius. Once this was done, I dropped the GPX files into GSAK and wallaa. (This really is less painful than it looks)

Next you need to filter using the ARC method. In GSAK, this basically means you need to copy and paste a list of coordinates into the filter under the ARC tab. Where do you get this list of coordinates, you ask? Well, I'm glad you asked that question because I have the answer. One way is to use MS Streets and Trips. Personally, I don't own that software so I used option number two. This involves heading over to Golden Horseshoe Geocachers website and loading up the ARC Builder page. This is an interactive map that allows you to click and create points along your route. Once you have all your points you want on the route, click on GPX File and you have what you need. Just copy and paste these coordinates and run the filter. I was amazed that it was this easy. Of course, I'm a computer geek so it seemed easy to me.

Back to the trip. On the way down, I was suprised at how sparse caches were through areas south of Tulsa. Of course, I did have my limit set to 5 miles from my path of travel. I guess I just expected more caches along a major hiway. I noticed an easy to snag cache in Calera Oklahoma, so I wandered of the beaten path by about 100 yards and grabbed "SCIFI-Stuff". That was it for that day as it was soon dark.

Today, I was preparing to depart Dallas to head home for Tulsa and I noticed that there was a cache about 2 blocks from work. It was "All by my Lonesome". I cruised over an judging by the name, it was obvious where the cache was located. I walked up to the cache, signed the log, and headed home. I feel much better now :)

Needless to say, I am very excited about the thought of geocaching around my old stomping grounds. The cache density is nothing like here in Tulsa, but it will keep me busy while I'm there. I would like to introduce some of my family to the sport at the same time. I'm sure my neices will love caching and I can't help but thinking my brother will like it as well since he is a gadget guy like me. If not, his wife is an IT person and I know she like gadgets !

Tags:

Geocaching
gps
tulsa
oklahoma
Texas
dallas

Beautiful Day to Geocache !!

We finally got out and did some caching today. Team ARC consisted of Robert, Mike and me today. We got started around 10:30 and we were able to find 3 caches in about 15 minutes right off the bat. The bad news is that I torqued the hell out of my knee on one cache. It was listed as a 4/4 and they were not lying. Between my knee and the pint of blood I lost from the thorns, I think it may need to be listed as a 5 on terrain !!

We ended up with 8 finds and 1 hide today. It was our first hide as a team and I hope to see it listed soon. I didn't find any pins today. I seem to have started a bit of a collection. My wife bought my a cork board to place them on along with my wooden geonickels. Well, I take that back...I did find one pic, but it was very religious and I ended up not taking it. I did find something cool today, though. At two of the caches we visited, we found some handmade pottery things. They were little ashtray type things painted in rainbow colors. I thing they were made by a younger person, but it was cool to find something handmade so I grabled both of them to add to my collection of stuff. Not sure what I will use them for but I like them :)

The weather was interesting today. It was warm...80ish..but we also had some thunderstorms in the area so there was some occassional sprinkles to cool us off. Most of the heavier storms were to the east so we just caught the edges. Hope everone has a great weekend. I am working from home tomorrow so my weekend is pretty much over. I have to head to Dallas on Monday, as well to meet with my counterpart for Texas. Should end up being a busy week, but I plan on catching a a cache or two while I'm there. I've already downloaded the caches in the area and just need to put the waypoints on my GPS.

Oh yeah, we also hid our first team cache today !!! It is called TARC Cache #1. Hopefully it will see approval in the near future.

Tags:
Geocaching
gps
tulsa
oklahoma

It's On....

We have officially scheduled and planned a geocaching outing for tomorrow. The weather is supposed to be beautiful and I cannot think of anything that could possibly get in the way of our caching trip tomorrow ! Now to sit down with GSAK, my Palm TX, and my Lowrance H2O and get ready for the outing. I've downloaded my PQ, loaded it into GSAK and should be ready to transfer everything. Yes, I'm psyched about going caching tomorrow :D

On a related topic, I think I have become addicted to geocoins. My collection has grown to 5 metal geocoins and 3 wooden geonickels. I even participated in my first trade this week. I traded an Oklahoma TAG coin for a PCFrog coin. What was really cool was I traded with someone in the Netherlands, no less ! I've seen many people on the GC.com forums talking about geocoins and I really never understood the craze. Then I ordered my first geocoin, the Texas Bluebonnet coin designed by a fellow Texan names Chris Crake and when it arrived, I knew it was all over but the crying. I was hooked from the start. It will be hard to find a coin more beautiful than the Bluebonnet, but I will do my best to try ! Honestly, if you are going to collect something, it is hard to beat geocoins as most are around $10. It is an affordable hobby and some of these things end up worth a lot of money. I saw one on eBay go for almost $300 recently. Of course, I won't be bidding on coins like that but I will by new ones as they are issued for seven to ten dollars. The real fun is buying two and trading the second coin for another coin.

I will try to post some photos of my geocoins soon.

Tags:
Geocaching
gps
tulsa
oklahoma
lowrance
PDA

Happy Birthday...

to me :D Yes, I just had a birthday yesterday. It was one of the big one's, no less. I turned 40 years old. I'm officially past the half way point according to most statisitics. I want to be bummed out about that, but for some reason, I'm not. I think the average age of death for men is like 78 years old, which, of course would indicate that I am more than half way there. I guess I am pretty happy with my life up to this point. I was a Paramedic for 8 years out of high school. I moved to Tulsa to go to flight school because I wanted to be a pilot. I had spent a couple of years as a flight medic prior to that and it seemed like a natural progression to me, at the time. To be honest, I had wanted to be a pilot most all of my life. My dream was to be an Air Force pilot, but I never really pursued that because I had asthma so bad as a child and didn't think I had a chance.

Once I decided to pursue it through the private industry, I was very successful. After only three years, I had my private, instrument, commercial and CFI ratings. Of course, it was to good to be true. I started having neurological problems shortly there after and was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. That was the end of a dream for me. I could no longer legally fly an aircraft. I was afraid I would be bitter about it, but I never was. In the long run, I always felt that I was quite priviliged to have just have gone through the training and have spent so much time flying. My Dad once asked me if I regreted spending so much on my training when I couldn't use it and I had to tell him that I did not. I am very fortunate to have got to fufill my dream of becoming a pilot. Even if it was short lived, I accomplished something that I never thought I would accomplish.

What does this have to do with my birthday, you ask? My friends took me out the other night to celebrate and I sliiped out for a few minutes. While I was outside, an MD-80 passed overhead. At that moment, it truly hit me that I was not where I had planned to be at this point in my life. It hit me that I would never reach the goals that I had set out for myself 15 years ago.

None the less, I am so fortuante to be doing something I love. I have reached somewhere I never saw myself reaching with the company I work for today. In spite of my bad luck...I am very lucky.

All that said, I am going geocaching this weekend, come hell or high water !

Ugh....I didn't even try to cache this weekend ! My friends took me out for my 40th birthday and I just kinda sat around and chilled this weekend.

I did watch a cool movies this weekend, though ! I watched "I walk the line" which is a movie about Johnny Cach and June Carter. It is a must see, in my opinion !

Is it Friday Yet ?

I REALLY need to go geocaching ! It has been too long. We had two weekends of bad weather and this last weekend, I was too busy to cache. I am really looking forward to getting out this weekend and doing some caching. It will be good for my soul. Work has been hell lately and I need a break so regardless of the weather, I will find some caches this weekend.

On a completely different note, I ran across this survey on another blogger's website and had to take it. Needless to say, I scored well.



Oh well, I always knew I was a nerd, so I'm not surprised.

Helmut Mueller

I just wanted to share a post I made to the gc.com forums tonight. it is one of the hardest post I have ever had to make. It concerns the death of a fellow geocacher:

Although I frequent the forums, I somehow missed that this had happened. When I read the first post, I was at a loss for words and nearly in tears even though I never had the pleasure of meeting this man and his family.

Even though I never met Helmut, I joined gc.com about the same time that he did and I have read his post for years and viewed the photos he posted in his gallery. I felt as though I knew him and I felt as though I knew his family. I took the time tonight to read each and every response in this thread and I now feel that I can talk about this. It is truly amazing how easy it is to become familiar with someone (and even feel close to them) via the internet. This has caused me to think back on everyone who I have met through the internet and even back to those from the BBS days and remember the impact that people have had on my life through computer communication. There are so many people that have been part of my life that I have never had the chance to shake their hand or share a laugh with. I am saddened by this but at the same time, I know that my life has been unmeasurably enriched because of their presence in my life even though it was not a physical presence. I am a better person because of people like Helmut.

To Ashley and Family- please know that your father touched many people. The number can never be measured because so many people have come and gone through gc.com, but I know if they spent anytime in the forums, they were impacted in some way by Helmut's post. Even if it was just learning something from what he posted, we were impacted. Please take strength from knowing how important he was to the geocaching community.

As I turn 40 in a couple of weeks. Helmut will definitely be on me mind. I am so fortunate to still have my father in my life. I grieve at your loss. There are no words that can make this any easier for you.

Cacheopedia?

A fellow blogger recently emailed me about a website that I was not aware existed. THat may seem trivial, but I pride myself on researching my hobbies, so I'm a little suprised that this one was missed by me. Head over to Adventures in Geocaching and read about the website here. I have just glanced over the site and I'm very impressed so far !

Lookin' Good

This weekend is shaping up to be a good weather weekend for some geocaching. I think we are going to be able to get Team ARC out in some fashion this weekend. At a minimum, Mike and I should be able to cache. I'm ready after having miserable weather for two weekends straight! Actually, I love winter weather and I'm not really complaining, but I would have liked to have geocached, as well. This last weekend was impossible. It snowed and sleeted about 3 inched Saturday and Sunday. I know some cachers that would have got out in that, but I'm not one of them :D

We are supposed to be in the mid-50's all weekend, so hopefully, we will get some geocaches unter out belts this weekend. I will update everyone on what we do. I'm going to do my best not to forget my camera this time !

Paperless Geocaching Premium Style

Earlier, I told you how to do paperless geocaching for free. It is relatively simple but it has a lot of steps involved. Since it was a little cumbersome, I decided to poney up some money and try to make paperless caching a little less painless. I have to tell you, it is well worth the money if you have it !

First, let me say there are several ways to go about paperless caching. It will mostly be a matter of taste and a matter of how much you can or want to spend. I will admit, I haven't bought some of the programs I would still like to try to make things even easier, but, the system I'm now using is much better than the free system.

You will need to accomplish several things before you can use this system.

1. You will need a Premium Membership at geocaching.com ($30)
2. Next you will need a program called GSAK. (I have not registered GSAK yet, but will soon be doing so) ($15)
3. You need a program to get your cache pages to you Palm device. I use Plucker Desktop. (Free)
4. You will need a program to read you files once they are on you Palm. I use Plucker. (Free)
5. As an alternative to Plucker and Plucker Desktop, you can use CacheMate. ($8)

Once you have you premium membership, install GSAK, install Plucker Desktop and place Plucker on your PDA, you are ready for paperless caching ! The first thing you will need to do is set up a pocket query at geocaching.com. There are lots of articles on how to do that so I won't bore you here. Once this is done, the PQ will be delivered to you email address. Be sure to have your PQ sent to you in zip format. Once it arrives, you will want to fire up GSAK. Open the zip file containing your PQ. Depending on how you set up you PQ, you will have 2-3 files included. You will need to drag and drop the larger gpx file into the open GSAK window. GSAK will offer you some options on importing the file but I just use the default options. At this point, you PQ will be imported and you are ready to play !

Next you will need to export the waypoints to your GPS. How you accomplish this will greatly depend on what GPS unit you own. I have a Lowance H2O which does not connect directly to my computer, but uses a SD card. I export my waypoints using the Lowrance usr format. I then copy the usr file to my SD card, place the card back in my GPS and load the data. GSAK will export directly to many GPS units. Once this is done, you have accomplished loading the caches into you GPS.

Next, you need to get the cache page that contain the cache information into your PDA. Since I am using the Plucker method, I use GSAK to export my loaded caches to html format. Once this export is completed, I open Plucked Desktop, create a channel called "Caches", and update the channel by pointing PDesktop to the files that GSAK just exported in html format. (Once the channel is created, you only have to update the channel in the future.) Now that this step is complete, the next time you sync your PDA, "Caches" will be placed on the PDA. You can then open Plucker on you PDA, select "Caches" and all of your cache information is located there. GSAK creates a "start" page that allows you to search for caches in many different ways. You can even customize that page.

I cannot say enough good about GSAK. It is truly an all-in-one tool that is highly customizable. I am only beginning to learn some of the many functions of the program. You can pretty much use it in default mode, but you would be missing out on so much functionality ! It is wonderful for searching for particular caches using the filter. If you just wanted to go looking for caches with travel bugs one day, you can set up the filter and do your exports and only caches with travel bugs will be shown. You can use this filter in more ways than I can sit her and list. I highly recommend spending some time at the GSAK website linked above just reading over the features, forums, and FAQs.

That pretty much summerizes my venture into the premium version of paperless geocaching. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or email me and I will try to help out or at least point you to where you can get a correct answer.

Now, if the weather would just change, I could go caching ! We have been getting snow, sleet, and freezing rain for two days now. Not the best weekend I've ever experienced :D I really don't mind the snow, but the freezing rain and wind chills in the single digits is a bit much for me to go geocaching !

Paperless Caching

Well, I have been playing with some of the paperless caching options available for those willing to spend a few buck and I have been very impressed with the options available. First and foremost, as a Lowrance user, I would like to recommend GSAK as an option. With my Lowrance H2O, Palm TX, and GSAK, and a geocaching.com Premium membership, I can do everything I need to do for paperless caching in style. I must say, it is worth the extra $s to do it this way. I will write a full review on the system that I have settled with this weekend.

Tags:
Geocaching
gps
lowrance
PDA