Geocaching with my Garmin 64s

[+alsimapa]

Hi,

 

I bought a Garmin GPSMAP 64s that I will use for geocaching. As a Premium Member, I created a PQ that includes 1000 caches around my home, and loaded it into my device. It's nice, as I can find caches that are near my position when I am walking in my town.

But sometimes I will want to be more selective, and focus only on a few caches for the day. For example, there is a serie of 6 caches that I want to find. Here is how I proceed to get them on my device :

 

On geocahing.com:

• By applying filters on keywords and owner, I could easily isolate the 6 caches I want to find
  
• Next step is to put these 6 caches in a list. I could not find a way to do it from the list display, I had to enter in each cache description and click on the Bookmark link. And the empty list has to be created before searching for the caches, as you cannot create a new list when you click on Bookmark, you can only add to an existing one.
  
• Once the list is created with the 6 caches, I created a PQ from it.
  

 

On my device:

• I loaded on the device the GPX files created by the PQ. But to easily find my 6 caches, I had to remove from the device all the other GPX files containing caches...
  
• Once I will have found my 6 caches, I will however not be able to look for other caches close to me, as I have deleted the other GPX files
  

 

I this the right way to proceed? I wish there were a way to have on the device several cache lists, and to easily switch between them, but it does not seem to be possible.

 

Patrick

[+StefandD]

Your device is able to filter the cache list. So if your 6 caches have something common in name, you can filter out only these ones. When you're done, simply disable the filter.

The cache list is standard sorted on distance. So when you're at the first cache, you'll probably see the second cache on the first page of the list. The chances are great you won't need to filter any more (unless you're living in an area with high cache density or the caches are really far away from each other). I have a permanent filter active which filters out found caches, which improves the overview of the list.

And of course, you can always look them up in Map View.

 

As for the web site, I use GSAK and have no use for pocket queries and bookmark lists. GSAK is able to get caches directly from the API and export them directly to the gpsr.

[+alsimapa]

Thank you for your answer, StefandD.

 

There are indeed some filter options on the 64s, but it some cases it will not be enough: there are in my area some sets of related caches that are quite distant from each other, with different type/difficulty/terrain and a lot of other caches in-between. I will try for these cases to create waypoints that will get me closer to the next cache, so that it will appear on the list ordered by distance.

 

I have installed GSAK on my computer, and have started playing with it. I have to spend more hours on it to determine if and how I will use it, but so far I can say that it's a very interesting tool.

[+shadowjig]

You might consider using your phone more for tasks like this. I've been trying to load the GPS with a few caches for the day and go, especially while headed to the trail.

 

Not sure if you have a smartphone or which kind. But I'm using an Android phone, but you might be able to do the same with an iPhone device. I use the cgeo app and it can retrieve the PQ's from geocaching.com directly and store them on my phone. Or I can browse a live map and store the caches (on the current map) into a list on my phone. Once I have my list of caches stored on my phone I export them to a GPX file using cgeo. Then use GPSdump to read the GPX file and send the waypoints to my Garmin GPSmap 60c. Grab the beta version of GPSdump from here http://www.gpsdump.no as it allows reading GPX files (waypoint name are 6 chars instead of 7, but that shouldn't be a huge problem). You'll also need USB OTG cable to plug the GPS into the micro USB on the phone.

 

Using the above method allows a great level of convenience.