Hopefully someone can answer this question for me.

I'm driving south down I75 to central Florida and want to download the caches along my route.
I've done pocket queries for the west side of Macon, Tifton, Valdosta, and Gainesville, Florida. I've kept the radius small enough to capture caches fairly close to the interstate, until I get to Gainesville, where I'll be staying.

So I've got four pocket queries. I can load them into my GPS one after another without any problem. Where the question comes, is how can I load these four files into one file in my PDA?

Cachemate limits me to 15 (I think) catogories, and I don't want to delete and/or temporarily rename a catagory just to accomodate the 17 caches around Valdosta (or was it Tifton?) if I can lump them all into one catagory with 400+ caches.

The way Cachemate is set up, if you import a bunch of caches into a catagory it replaces what's already there, so I have to combine the four files into one before doing the upload.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

~erik~

I use GSAK for similar stuff.

Just make a new database in GSAK and open all the GPX files from GC.com into it. (Make sure you uncheck "clear database before loading".) It's then a couple of mouse clicks to make the Cachemate file you need.

In Cachemate, there is a setting to add to a category rather then overwrite it. My PDA is out in the car and it's raining so that's all the detail I can give at this time. I think its in the options area.

I use GSAK to keep the information from my PQ's. It will produce Cachemate files so it could be a solution for you. Me, I still prefer plucker so I use GSAK to create plucker files.

But if you don't want to use GSAK you can use GPSBabel. If you aren't use to command line program it can be painful. However Robertlipe actually has an example of this exact problem in a groundspeak forum message

gpsbabel -i gpx -f 1.gpx -f 2.gpx -f 3.gpx -f 4.gpx -f 5.gpx -x duplicate,shortname -o gpx -F blah.gpx

This will merge those five gpx files together, toss out anything with duplicate shortnames (which, from a geocaching view is "GCxxxxx") and smoosh the results in"blah.gpx"

Rebels right. I use CacheMate and under the Options/Preferences menu, I check the 'Merge import file records'. This adds the imported caches to the category you choose without overwriting the ones already there.

PS: Glad you found Another Cache recently. Enjoy your trip.

A new filter feature of GSAK 5 is to find waypoints in an 'Arc', 'Polygon' and 'Points'. GSAK describes 'Arc' as:
The arc filter is designed to include waypoints based on their proximity to an arc, which is a series of connected line segments similar to a route or a track but without any associated data other than the coordinates.
In its simplest form the arc filter contains only two points (that is, a straight line). However, you must also specify a distance from the arc you want waypoints selected.

So select a couople of or a series of points with distance from and create ONE file.

That seemed to work. The Cachemate Import File Converter converted each file seperately, they all uploaded to the PDA simultaniously, but then were loaded and merged one at a time into the same Cachemate catagory folder in the PDA. From what I can tell I got 300 caches in Gainesville, 23 in west Macon, 6 in Tifton, and 17 in Valdosta.

Now if only the family will let me look for one or two of those.

~erik~

Unfortunately my PDA apparently flipped out over the cold today and would not turn on. The screen stayed dark until I used the reset pin.

Now it works, but everything I'd entered is lost and has to be reloaded. Bummer.

~erik~

Ouch!
Good thing you found out about it today, and not on the road.
Travel safely.

I've taken several long trips in the car since I've discovered Geocaching Swiss Pocket Knife and have really enjoyed the use of the arc filter feature Joebids mentioned.

You can load all your caches (1000's) and then output only the ones within 1 mile of your drive. On one car trip it reduced 800+ caches down to 58. Surely your family wouldn't mind you stopping at a few rest stops and random exits for caches?

The only trick is making the list of waypoints to use in the filter, but using a map program (I use MapSource that came with my Garmin) makes that easy too.