After the last GGA meeting I thought I should join the paperless crowd. I purchased a Palm Tungsten E (for "erik"), and a nifty aluminum case for the thing.

With some help from mtn-man (thanks!) I was able to load Spinner and Plucker on a PC and load my first file of 100 caches onto the Palm. I was amazed at the detail on the screen. I pulled up a cache page that had a photo on it and it was great! I also loaded the 100 caches onto my old Garmin GPS 12 Map.

That lead to a problem. The file of caches was for the Dothan, Alabama area. Because of the lousy weather last week I was only able to find one cache, at the Kolomoki Indian Mounds State Park near Blakely, Ga. The problem was when I returned home I was able to easily delete the Alabama file from my Palm, but not from the GPS.

There's probably a way to delete all the waypoints from a GPS, but I only wanted to delete these hundred. There were another 20 I wanted to keep. How do others deal with this?

I deleted them one by one, which involved three key punches to select, delete, and confirm the deletion of each one. It took awhile to perform the 300 key punches. There's got to be another way, especially since my next Pocket Query is for 500 caches. If these were files on a PC I'd highlight the first one, hold down the shift key, highlight the last one, then hit the delete key. Can't do that on the GPS.

Is there some way to download all the waypoints to a PC, delete them from the GPS, easily massage the waypoints on the PC, then upload them back to the GPS?

~erik~

quote:

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Is there some way to download all the waypoints to a PC, delete them from the GPS, easily massage the waypoints on the PC, then upload them back to the GPS?

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I used EasyGPS (easygps.com) to do just that thing when I was Mac-less and using Honey-do's PeeCee. I kept several files for different criteria (ex: my caches; 100 closest to home; 100 for a different area) and would just wipe out all waypoints in the GPS and upload just the files I needed for the week.
I'm sure the Winblows crowd will soon chime in and give more relevant info/alternatives.

Hope this helps.

"Give to a pig when it grunts and a child when it cries, and you'll have a fine pig and a bad child." -Proverb

CONGRATS on going paperless - you'll never go back. Before too long, you'll just carry a small notepad to make pertinent notes (or just do 'em on the Palm.)

"Give to a pig when it grunts and a child when it cries, and you'll have a fine pig and a bad child." -Proverb

My current method of keeping the waypoints in my GPS V matching the Plucker files in my palm. Now this is based on the fact that my Remailer pre-converts the Pocket Query GPX to a plucker file and Garmin wpt file.

When the Pocket query email arrives:

• I place the plucker file in my Palm Install tool and start the hot sync
  
• I fire up Mapsource and use it to grab all the waypoints in the GPS V.
  
• I save that to a file on my PC because I am paranoid.
  
• I delete all the geocaches in waypoint list. This is easy because they all start with G. This leaves just the non geocache waypoints
  
• I save this to a different file, because I am paranoid.
  
• I open a second copy of Mapsource
  
• I import the wpt file into the second Mapsource.
  
• I copy and paste the Geocache waypoints into the first mapsource. So it now has my non-geocache waypoints plus the new geocache waypoints
  
• I close the second mapsource
  
• I save this file.
  
• I clear all the waypoints in my GPS V.
  
• I use mapsource to load all the waypoints back into my GPS V.
  

Now if you are not as paranoid as I am you can skip the extra saves. Also if I am not changing the area for geocaches and in a hurry, I just load the new wpt file into my GPS, any waypoint with same name is overlayed, new ones are added. The only problem is geocaches archived since the last load will still be in my GPS.

If you are using spinner, you of course can do the same thing, but you have to spin and pluck it yourself before placing it in your palm.

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Some of those that wander are lost!

I'll have to try what you suggested Allen.

~erik~

PS. Did anyone ever tell you that you might be paranoid?

It's not paranoia if they are REALLY out to get ya!

Erik, if you want access to the Remailer just send me an email and I will set you up. If it doesn't suit your needs it is easy not to use it.

And remember even paranoids have enemies.

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Some of those that wander are lost!

For waypoints that I want to keep in my GPS all the time I change the symbol immediately to something else. I use just the pin-point symbol. I have spinner convert all cache icons to the geocaching not found box (garmin feature only I think) or to the cemetary if it has 5 not founds or more. I can then mass delete by symbol and load new PQ's in very quickly. I have a Vista and "old yeller", so I am not sure how other Garmins work. I don't think the little yellow eTrex does that so Allen's method would be a great way to accomplish that. If you don't have Mapsource you could do the same procedure with EasyGPS or Watcher (free programs).

I don't do deletes by symbol because I have too many of them. A garmin geocache for traditional, a picnic table for events, information (shows as ?) for virtual, a toll booth for micros (don't ask why) a stadium (shows a bunch of flags) for multi. If I am loading ones I have found, then they show as found geocache. But all of them start with G (not GC).

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Some of those that wander are lost!

I do the smae thing PhatBak does (i think).
Whenever I need to delete a bunch of the waypoints that I used say far away from here. i grab the waypoints from the GPS bia EasyGPS and save the file. Then delete all waypoints off the GPS and reload all that I need back on there.

Happy Hunting!
-Amazingracer

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

Wow!

I'm glad I have an SD card in my Magellan.
All I do is save the waypoints to the SD card.
I can later edit the file to remove any I don't want in there.

Kenneth

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I picked up a Palm m125 today, but I can't say I've gone paperless yet. Every time the Plucker desktop comes it starts with the error message "locale can not be set. Stuff on the Palm desktop, like calander and notes transfer to the handheld but the geocach html pages won't go. Oh well, it's only six hours old.

I got the "locale can not be set" when I first installed plucker. This is what I think I did to fix it.
Start the desktop
Click "Options" on the top menu
Select preferences
Make sure the "Translate interface into the local language" isn't checked.

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Some of those that wander are lost!

What I've been doing is to use GSAK.

a) I mark all finds in GSAK
b) Reload/update all caches via GSAK to my G 76
b) Delete all found caches by symbol

or

c) Set up a GSAK filter to select only a cache subset
d) Load GPSr when filter applied, which loads only the filtered caches

Thanks Allen. Your remembered correctly. The error message dissappeared and now I can communicate with the handheld. Unfortunately, all that goes over are the Index files. When I click on a cache, it tells me the site loaded by Plucker was either an external site or exceeded max depth of the page it was asked to retrieve. I moved the depth setting to 3 with no effect. I'll try again tonight. Meanwhile i'm keeping my printer.

What are you using to generate the HTML?
Is it GPX Spinner or gpx2html? In either case go to the directory where the index file was built and make sure the cache pages are there.

Now if you sign up for my GPX EMail Remailer you will get email with the file ready to load to your palm.

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Some of those that wander are lost!

[This message was edited by AllenLacy on March 04, 2004 at 01:18 PM.]

Plucker decided it had tormented me enough. When I fired it up this morning, it cooperated. The only thing I know I did differently from yesterday is when a box popped up asking if it could go online, I said yes even though I was offline. It made some cheerful sounds and produced a usable Palm file.