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Is a Puzzlement


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Preparing to go out on a maintenance run, I loaded a PQ of “Caches I Own” onto my Garmin Montana 600. Drove down the Interstate and stopped at each exit where the GPS told me that I had a cache, but as I passed one exit, I went “Hey, I’ve got a cache there; why isn’t it in the PQ?” Turned out there were 3 of my caches along the Interstate that didn’t come up in the PQ.

 

Sometime later I was looking at the GPS again, and went to “Show Found.” What a surprise to see the 3 missing caches showing as Found! These are caches that I placed and I did not log Found on any of them.

 

I thought maybe it’s another type of log that is triggering the Found status, but the only log type that I have on all 3 of these is OM—and most of my other caches also have OM logs.

 

I deleted the PQ file from the Montana, reran the PQ and reloaded it—same results.

 

Then yesterday I loaded the same PQ onto my old Legend HCx and the only ones of my caches that show as Found on that device are the ones that I adopted. (Yes, these also show as Found on the Montana, but that is as expected and not at all puzzling.)

 

Anyone have any ideas? Or has anyone seen this before?

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Things to try:

 

1. Open the GPX file in a plain text editor and scroll (or ctrl-F to find by name) to the specific caches in question to see if they are marked found in the pocket query. Within each cache, it will ether by denoted by

<sym> Geocache </sym>
<sym> Geocache Found </sym>

 

If it's marked as found, you can change it to unfound.

 

2. Now that's likely not to be the problem, in which case, could it be possible that in the past you may have marked your own cache as found on your GPS, but not logged as such on the website? If that's the case, the GPS will still keep track of your finds via the field notes files geocache_visits.txt and geocache_logs.xml. Deleting these files will forget all past geocaching activity on the GPS (that's ok if you've logged everything already at the website), but it will also reset the internal database to read the cache status based on the GPX file.

 

3. barring that doesn't work, you can also just mark a found cache as "did not attempt" in the GPS and it will return to an unfound icon and status in the list.

Edited by Mineral2
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Things to try:

 

1. Open the GPX file in a plain text editor and scroll (or ctrl-F to find by name) to the specific caches in question to see if they are marked found in the pocket query. Within each cache, it will ether by denoted by

<sym> Geocache </sym>
<sym> Geocache Found </sym>

 

If it's marked as found, you can change it to unfound.

 

2. Now that's likely not to be the problem, in which case, could it be possible that in the past you may have marked your own cache as found on your GPS, but not logged as such on the website? If that's the case, the GPS will still keep track of your finds via the field notes files geocache_visits.txt and geocache_logs.xml. Deleting these files will forget all past geocaching activity on the GPS (that's ok if you've logged everything already at the website), but it will also reset the internal database to read the cache status based on the GPX file.

 

3. barring that doesn't work, you can also just mark a found cache as "did not attempt" in the GPS and it will return to an unfound icon and status in the list.

 

You are brilliant!

 

1. You were right: it isn't this. All caches were marked with<sym> Geocache </sym>.

 

2. I didn't have the caches marked in the GPS as Found, but I did have them marked as Needs Repair. Apparently the GPS interprets Needs Repair as Found.

I deleted all the content in geocache_visits.txt and now the caches are Not found.

 

Thank you!

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2. I didn't have the caches marked in the GPS as Found, but I did have them marked as Needs Repair. Apparently the GPS interprets Needs Repair as Found.

I deleted all the content in geocache_visits.txt and now the caches are Not found.

Yes, I ran into that a while back. I think Garmin treats that option similarly to how the new Geocaching.com logging page does: "Found and also needs repair".

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