PQing efficiently

[+Dragery]

Can anyone recommend a good method for efficiently retrieving PQ's for very cache saturated regions? Like Southern California, I can't get more then a 10 mile radius from ANY location without going over the 1000 cache limit for PQ's. I'm looking for the best method to maximized the available caches on my unit (it holds 10,000) without overlapping (much), or missing caches. yeah, I feel like I have obsessive compulsive disorder while Geocaching.

Edited June 12, 2010 by trainmanup

[+Markwell]

Select a radius. Group them by date placed. Make sure that each subsection has just under 1,000.

 

http://markwell.us/pq.htm#tips

[+Dragery]

Thank you very much.

[+ras_oscar]

You can also get a number of strategically selected points, let them overlap a bit and load them up into GSAK. It will eliminate the duplicates. How many days does it take you to find all 1,000 caches, anyway? I have 4 queries I run about once a month. Haven't run out of searches yet.

Edited June 12, 2010 by ras_oscar

[+Dragery]

You can also get a number of strategically selected points, let them overlap a bit and load them up into GSAK. It will eliminate the duplicates. How many days does it take you to find all 1,000 caches, anyway? I have 4 queries I run about once a month. Haven't run out of searches yet.

 

It's not a matter of doing them all, it's a matter of having them available to me. Right now, I've been running 2000 caches once a week. One of them is a 14.4 mile radius around my work, the other is a 10.4 mile radius around my home. My whole goal was to load up all 10,000 spots with as much of my travelable Southern California area, without getting some of the stupid spots I know I wont go to.. ever. And with a circle selector it's hard to select one desirable city without dipping drastically into areas I will never use.

 

I ended up doing the suggestion about sorting by date.. that only allowed me a 33 mile radius from my home location before using up all 10,000 spots haha. I'll load up all the ones prior to 2010, then keep the 2010+ one refreshed every week. Occasionally refreshing the older ones in case some become reactivated. (yes I left about 1200 spots open for random waypoints, and new caches)

Edited June 12, 2010 by trainmanup

[+Markwell]

You'll want to refresh the whole thing weekly. Cache get archived and disabled.

[jholly]

Markwell's suggestion is a good one. You will also want to keep an eye on the numbers of caches returned on each PQ. The old date PQ's will tend to decrease as caches get archived and the new date PQ will tend to hit the limit of 1000 as new caches are placed. You will have to juggle the dates on a regular basis to keep things balanced and working smoothly.

[+Dragery]

Markwell's suggestion is a good one. You will also want to keep an eye on the numbers of caches returned on each PQ. The old date PQ's will tend to decrease as caches get archived and the new date PQ will tend to hit the limit of 1000 as new caches are placed. You will have to juggle the dates on a regular basis to keep things balanced and working smoothly.

 

Lol they should just make a PQ option for a once a week 10,000 PQ. Since most new units support that many. And find a way to break it up for viewing purposes as to not bog your system down when rendering.

Or have a 3rd party program request caches in a certain area, then once you get what you want, just send another request to process into PQ.

[+Markwell]

I routinely get a pretty cache dense area and import the PQ into GSAK. Then I slice and dice the data - a polygon of an areas in which I normally travel, only traditional non-micro caches, only terrains 1.5-4.0 and difficulty less than 4.0. The four most recent logs only 3 or more finds. All things considered that brings me down to a decent number of pre-selected, ready-to-find caches.

 

I utilize the same pocket query and GSAK filter each week, and exclude the disabled or archived caches. Then it's ready to load once each week. Takes some initial setup, but once it's done, I get fresh data of the caches I like to find.

[+Dragery]

I routinely get a pretty cache dense area and import the PQ into GSAK. Then I slice and dice the data - a polygon of an areas in which I normally travel, only traditional non-micro caches, only terrains 1.5-4.0 and difficulty less than 4.0. The four most recent logs only 3 or more finds. All things considered that brings me down to a decent number of pre-selected, ready-to-find caches.

 

I utilize the same pocket query and GSAK filter each week, and exclude the disabled or archived caches. Then it's ready to load once each week. Takes some initial setup, but once it's done, I get fresh data of the caches I like to find.

 

And if there was just a way to filter out bushwhacking caches also!!!!!

[jholly]

And if there was just a way to filter out bushwhacking caches also!!!!!

 

Why? those are the good ones