While maybe not as necessary as it is on geocaching.com, would it make sense to have a similiar forum here for newbies like me? Just a thought, since there's not a category for it.

My experience has been that this group is so friendly that "newbie" questions are welcome and treated respectfully without being relegated to another section.

I've been caching for awhile now, but we are all still learning. I'm still asking questions and wouldn't hesitate to ask anything. These guys that cruise this forum are very knowledgable and have answered everything I've ever wanted to know, no matter how tivial. The problem is that you might get more information than you wanted!! Feel free to ask ANYTHING!

'Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig.' - Anonymous

Good point.

Ok, then...


Should I or should I not get the (fill in the blank) cable to connect my Rino 110 to my PC to get EasyGPS stuff, or am I doing just as well manually entiring it?

I love the cable and have two. One stays on my main desktop computer and the other stays in my laptop bag for the road. You can download many caches at once on the state search page or just get them one at a time. The big benifit comes if you join Geocaching.com as a "Charter Member". You can then get what is called a "Pocket Query". You can set several parameters for a query search of the site. You can base a search on zip codes, coordinates, or just the state and select what types of caches to query or not to query (traditional, virtual, multi-caches, etc.). It is a powerful tool, and the results are sent to you via email. You can set up as many as five Pocket Queries (PQ's). PQ's have become very popular and will be sent to you once a week if you want.

I use PQ's to do a search around my hotel when I am on the road. I can load 75 caches and then try to do as many as I can. With so many options I can usually hit several that I see on my GPS. The PQ will also send a file that will go onto a PDA so you can carry those same cache pages in your PDA and not print out 75 cache pages. Awesome tool on the road. I bought my Palm PDA primarily for Geocaching!!!

"Charter Membership" cost $30 a year or $3 a month, and you can set up an automatic deduction for the $3 a month on PayPal if you have an account.

[This message was edited by mtn-man on December 17, 2002 at 11:54 PM.]

I use the cable but I don't use EasyGPS, I just use Garmin Mapsource software. Lots of time I copy and paste the info from the web page to mapsource then load it to the GPS.

But I have "Charter Membership" which allows me to get the cache information in 3 different types of files

EasyGPS loc file which can be used by EasyGPS and its big brother programs to load coordinates into GPS.
eBook Format which has the "text" of Geocaching pages and can used by PDA, or windows computer with the "free" program Mobireader (which I don't like)
GPX which is a new computer friendly format which contains all the text and cooridinates. It can be used by EasyGPS to load coordinates.

I had set up my own system to provide information to the palm. However the release of GPX has made me wonder if it can be used some how. I already have a program which will convert GPX to a form Garmin's Mapsource can load. I think I can convert the information to the Palm Standard document format so the mobireader doesn't have to be used, to read it on a palm. If anyone would be interested in either converting GPX to garmin's mapsource, or a standard palm document file, let me know