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Downloading All Caches from Geocaching.com to Oregon 650


SoCalKayaker

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Hi Everyone,

 

I'm highly considering buying the Oregon 650 largely because it can hold so many caches. However, I'm wondering if it's possible to download all of the caches from this website as opposed to Garmin's Opencaching.com? Your input and help with this would be much appreciated. I'm looking for an easy way to simply download lots of caches.

 

Thank you!

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Hi Everyone,

 

I'm highly considering buying the Oregon 650 largely because it can hold so many caches. However, I'm wondering if it's possible to download all of the caches from this website as opposed to Garmin's Opencaching.com? Your input and help with this would be much appreciated. I'm looking for an easy way to simply download lots of caches.

 

Thank you!

 

All of the caches? You really need 2.5 million geocaches on your GPS?

I don't think it would hold that many- but you can download as much as it can hold from here if you want, it will still work.

 

Just remember though, because you can doesn't mean you should. All that info gets old, fast. The cache may have a change in description, hint, even location. Or it might not be there at all any more. You'd have to just download what you want to find, or set up a weekly pocket query, to keep up to date. Old cqche info is like an old phonebook. You might get lucky, by chances are your luck will run out at some time.

Edited by T.D.M.22
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PQs are limited to 1000 caches, and a Premium member can only do 10 a day... so you're effectively limited to 10,000/day, at best...

 

At that rate, it's gonna take you a considerable amount of time to load them ALL.

 

What I've done, it use GSAK to break down the caches within 500 miles of me, into 1000 cache chunks, by the date they were hidden. Then I downloaded all those, which proved to be a much more useful list.

 

If I plan on going further than 500 miles, I just do PQs for that specific area.

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The Oregon 6xx can hold 4 million geocaches, so yes, theoretically it is possible.

 

However, it would take you half a year (PQs + API) to download 2.5 million geocaches. And when you're done, your oldest set is half a year out of date. And there are caches that were published up to half a year ago that are not in your data set.

 

You can speed it up by purchasing additional premium membership accounts, of course. How to design an effective PQ set is left as an exercise to the reader.

 

You can read Markwell's excellent tutorial on how to create multiple PQs to cover all caches in an area. http://markwell.us/pq.htm#tips

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Thank you both for your responses. Do you know if there is an easy way to download say 500 at a time?

Create a PQ query. You can return up to 1000 in each PQ.

 

Download the ZIP file. Unzip and copy the xxxxxxxx.GPX (not the xxxxxxxx-wpts.GPX) file to your <DEVICE>:\GARMIN\GPX folder.

 

(not the xxxxxxxx-wpts.GPX) Why not? There are the Additional Coordinates in there...

If it's a multi that has the coordinates for the stage, what you gonna do if they're not on your GPS? :huh:

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Thank you both for your responses. Do you know if there is an easy way to download say 500 at a time?

Create a PQ query. You can return up to 1000 in each PQ.

 

Download the ZIP file. Unzip and copy the xxxxxxxx.GPX (not the xxxxxxxx-wpts.GPX) file to your <DEVICE>:\GARMIN\GPX folder.

 

(not the xxxxxxxx-wpts.GPX) Why not? There are the Additional Coordinates in there...

If it's a multi that has the coordinates for the stage, what you gonna do if they're not on your GPS? :huh:

I've always found the implementation of additional waypoints for geocaches a little awkward, but you're right, I should have said "not ONLY the xxxxxxxx-wpts.gpx file".

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Isn't the xxxxx-wpts.GPX usually a collection of parking places or other features mentioned by coordinates in the description? I haven't used it much, so I'm making sure I understand.

Normally, yes... you should copy BOTH files.

 

For those that want to load extraordinary amounts of data, they may want to exclude that as being, shall we say, unnecessary(?).

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Isn't the xxxxx-wpts.GPX usually a collection of parking places or other features mentioned by coordinates in the description? I haven't used it much, so I'm making sure I understand.

 

It contains the 'Additional Coordinates'

Yes, parking can be there.

It could also contains the stages of a multi-cache, if the stages are listed rather than 'hidden'

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Normally, yes... you should copy BOTH files.

 

For those that want to load extraordinary amounts of data, they may want to exclude that as being, shall we say, unnecessary(?).

 

Install the additional waypoints as custom POIs to avoid this problem. There is a nice GSAK macro that manages all of this easily.

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Just to throw in another angle: The Oregon 6** (along with some other models)has been known to have some freeze-up problems. Some people think that the problems may be caused by corrupted .gpx pr .ggz files. If this is the case, loading an enormous number of caches may be asking for trouble.

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Thank you both for your responses. Do you know if there is an easy way to download say 500 at a time?

Create a PQ query. You can return up to 1000 in each PQ.

 

Download the ZIP file. Unzip and copy the xxxxxxxx.GPX (not the xxxxxxxx-wpts.GPX) file to your <DEVICE>:\GARMIN\GPX folder.

 

(not the xxxxxxxx-wpts.GPX) Why not? There are the Additional Coordinates in there...

If it's a multi that has the coordinates for the stage, what you gonna do if they're not on your GPS? :huh:

 

For the few multi's I attempt that have published intermediate waypoints, I'll go to the individual listing and download the cache (using send to GPS) which includes the geocache and all of its waypoints. I'll then make a route with those waypoints in Basecamp to follow to each stop.

 

Otherwise, I've found that including the xxxx-wpts.gpx file leaves way too many waypoints to navigate through, not to mention trying to figure out which caches they belong with.

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Isn't the xxxxx-wpts.GPX usually a collection of parking places or other features mentioned by coordinates in the description? I haven't used it much, so I'm making sure I understand.

 

It contains the 'Additional Coordinates'

Yes, parking can be there.

It could also contains the stages of a multi-cache, if the stages are listed rather than 'hidden'

Parking, trailheads, location of shelters and rest rooms, trail intersections and other points of interest along the journey. If I take the time to enter such things in the waypoints section, I don't duplicate that info in the cache description. I just mention that they are there, so finders know they will be included in the download.

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Hey SoCalKayaker (BaytownKayaker)! Happy Caching! I know this is an old post, I just stumbled on to it because I just did a search on google for "downloading every geocache to gps" and it led me here. My wife and I started caching about the time this original post was done and we love it. I see your cache count is low so I'll assume you're not an active cacher anymore but for those out there that are asking the same question...

I have a garmin Oregon 600t gps. With the 32Gb flash card I have in it, it will easily hold every cache, over 3 million now worldwide. I think I probably have about 30,000 downloaded to it now, maybe 40k.

 

The question asked: Is there a way or place to do it? I have not found that place yet but would love to find it. I too hate only being able to dld 1000 caches at a time from geocache.com pocket queries, especially in a circle form on the map, there are way too many gaps when trying to cover an area with a circle. It would be nice if you could do a square or rectangle, like gsak does, however gsak is limited to 500 caches to download at a time with their coverage if I'm not mistaken. Also, gsak is good until you pretty much have to pay for it to do anything productive with it, unless you like waiting 60 seconds after every click of your mouse to do anything.

 

And to the previous posts: YES! There are people that want to download EVERY cache at once, including me. If I can do it once, then I can do it again in a year, or 6 months, or whatever. Most caches do NOT change information often enough to make me not want to dld them all.

 

Maybe I just need to develop a better way to create pocket queries. Even so, you're still limited to 1k caches at a time.

 

I wonder if it would be possible to download every cache in a state, or in a country, rather than every one in the world. Maybe a larger coverage in pocket queries? Maybe a higher limit on pocket queries? 10k? 100k?

 

If anyone has any good suggestions or links for dld'ing great big truckloads of caches all at once please message me on geocache on my profile.

Thank you and happy caching! ~.o

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And to the previous posts: YES! There are people that want to download EVERY cache at once, including me. If I can do it once, then I can do it again in a year, or 6 months, or whatever. Most caches do NOT change information often enough to make me not want to dld them all.

 

Again, I'm going to follow up with a question: Why do you feel the need to have so many caches on your device at once? Many states have 20,000 geocaches listed, and that's at the low end. You can't find that many in a day, let alone a week. Maybe a month of nothing but caching, you could clean out a small state on the east coast. But even then, why would you need all of them loaded on the GPS, rather than the area you are searching, swapping out PQ files as you move to another area? Why would you need caches from the rest of the country or other countries in the world that you infrequently visit on your device at all times? So before we even get to the "how," let's justify the "why." Because it's not worth anyone's time to solve this problem if it doesn't actually make your geocaching experience any more efficient or fulfilling.

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It would be nice if you could do a square or rectangle, like gsak does, however gsak is limited to 500 caches to download at a time with their coverage if I'm not mistaken. Also, gsak is good until you pretty much have to pay for it to do anything productive with it, unless you like waiting 60 seconds after every click of your mouse to do anything.

 

GSAK along with any API partner can do 6000 caches per day with full info or 10000 with "light" info. You can do any shape you want and it can all be automated.

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If anyone has any good suggestions or links for dld'ing great big truckloads of caches all at once please message me on geocache on my profile.

Thank you and happy caching! ~.o

 

I just looked at your profile and see you average 1.33 caches/day. Assuming you REALLY want 3000000 caches on your GPS and are able to find them all (including the scuba ones, Mount Everest, D5 mysteries, T5....) that would keep you busy for the next 6180 years. You might want to increase your daily average :ph34r:

 

There are many ways to increase the amount caches you can download but since you think GSAK is not worth paying for, multiple PM's are probably out of the question? Every PM will get you 10 PQs with 1000 caches daily so do the math and get your CC out ;)

 

Just looking at my area I wouldn't even think about going out with one week old cache data as there are caches archived, disabled and new ones published daily.

 

Not only is loading all caches inefficient, there's no valid reason to download caches half way around the world either unless you travel at the blink of an eye to all corners of the world (again looking at you profile, you're not). It seems you just want to do it, "because you can" (or at least your GPS can hold that many).

 

Learning to use PQ's will go a long way (hint: placed date) to get around the "radius issue".

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The "caches along a route" also makes caching road trips much more practical beyond simple radius queries.

 

I'll be somewhat more firm than the (correct and polite) above responses. Your request is impractical and the site intentionally makes it impractical. Freshness matters in cache listings and you really don't want to try to manually build a mirror of the site. With a single premium membership, you can have 70,000 cache entries and nothing will be more than a week old. 70,000 finds in a week will make you a geocaching legend. If you focus on what you will realistically hunt in a week, it's really not an onerous restriction. In high density areas, a thousand can be a drag, but being able to run ten PQs each day, each returning a thousand caches means that with even a little bit of planning, you can always be within a week of any realistic ground you may cover. Most of us don't cache on multiple continents with no notice, for example.

 

Please state your actual goal in a more realistic form ("I'm a business traveler and cover a large area in a three state region" or "I'm a truck driver that covers I-40 end-to-end several times a month" or whatever and you'll get better advice on how to reach it. "I want to build a mirror of the site and carry it with me at all times" isn't going to get you a better answer than "Buy 43 (and growing) premium memberships and get creative and efficient managing PQs"

 

Also, while Garmin claims "unlimited" in a ggz file, I would not be at all surprised to see their firmware have serious usability problems when faced with millions. Even with "mere" thousands, searches and map draw times at distant zooms take a hit.

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