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How to download all caches from a state?


atate75

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Well, as a Premium Member as stated you can get 5 PQs (pocket queries) per day, of up to 1,000 caches each. So in a single day you can download 5,000 caches. In one week then you can get 35,000 caches. From your profile it appears you are in AL- which has a bit over 17,000 caches (per GC.com), so in 4 days you can collect a good amount of your state's worth.

 

But, the trick is centering your PQs to capture them all, and there will be overlap in coverage that then needs filtering with a program such as GSAK. Another concern is how many caches can your Oregon 600 handle? I believe the limit is 5,000 caches, but perhaps it can use the .ggz file type? I have to wonder why you want to have an entire state worth of caches first of all.

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Well, as a Premium Member as stated you can get 5 PQs (pocket queries) per day, of up to 1,000 caches each. So in a single day you can download 5,000 caches. In one week then you can get 35,000 caches. From your profile it appears you are in AL- which has a bit over 17,000 caches (per GC.com), so in 4 days you can collect a good amount of your state's worth.

It's 10 PQs now, so 10,000 a day and 70,000 a week. Add to that another 6000 per day through the API. So theoretically, 112000 per week.

 

Another concern is how many caches can your Oregon 600 handle? I believe the limit is 5,000 caches, but perhaps it can use the .ggz file type?

4 million is what Garmin claimed, and I don't think it is restricted to GGZ. Even if it is, it should be trivial to convert between GPX and GGZ.

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Well, as a Premium Member as stated you can get 5 PQs (pocket queries) per day, of up to 1,000 caches each. So in a single day you can download 5,000 caches. In one week then you can get 35,000 caches. From your profile it appears you are in AL- which has a bit over 17,000 caches (per GC.com), so in 4 days you can collect a good amount of your state's worth.

It's 10 PQs now, so 10,000 a day and 70,000 a week. Add to that another 6000 per day through the API. So theoretically, 112000 per week.

 

Another concern is how many caches can your Oregon 600 handle? I believe the limit is 5,000 caches, but perhaps it can use the .ggz file type?

4 million is what Garmin claimed, and I don't think it is restricted to GGZ. Even if it is, it should be trivial to convert between GPX and GGZ.

It is the GGZ file format that allows the bigger numbers.

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It is the GGZ file format that allows the bigger numbers.

 

Not true, I've loaded about 70,000 caches on my Oregon 650 using solely GPX. A buddy of mine had pretty large chunk of Arizona on hand for his upcoming trip, and we got curious. It took a long time to boot up, but it imported them all as verified by some random spot checking for certain caches. Now that there's a separate zoom level on the map for geocaches, it's fun to set it to some ridiculous value like 500 mi and zoom out and see all the icons.

 

EDIT: We made sure not to exceed the 2000 GPX file limit on the device. In fact, GSAK spit out all the caches in one giant GPX file.

Edited by insig
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It is the GGZ file format that allows the bigger numbers.

 

Not true, I've loaded about 70,000 caches on my Oregon 650 using solely GPX. A buddy of mine had pretty large chunk of Arizona on hand for his upcoming trip, and we got curious. It took a long time to boot up, but it imported them all as verified by some random spot checking for certain caches. Now that there's a separate zoom level on the map for geocaches, it's fun to set it to some ridiculous value like 500 mi and zoom out and see all the icons.

 

EDIT: We made sure not to exceed the 2000 GPX file limit on the device. In fact, GSAK spit out all the caches in one giant GPX file.

Thanks for confirming. I've never read anywhere that the large number of caches is restricted to GGZ only. I have over 5000 loaded on mine but I never verified that they are all present.

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OK, did some research on GGZ.

 

1. It is a compressed (zipped) GPX with an additional XML index.

 

2. The XML index contains only the information used for searching and sorting, resulting in much faster response.

 

3. It is supported by GSAK.

 

The only place that claims that only GGZ supports large number of geocaches is GeoGet. Garmin makes no such claim. It could be that an Oregon 600 with 4 million geocaches in GPX files may be slow to the point of being unusable.

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I know that PQs are limited to 1000 caches.

 

I also know that I can make 10 PQs per day.

 

What if the state has more than 1000?

 

If I wanted to add an entire state how would I go about doing that?

 

How many caches in the state?

Do you really need ALL of them? (eg D5/T5, Unknowns, Wherigo etc.)

 

Best way is to limit each PQ to Date Placed. Early caches get years to a PQ, later caches get a month to a PQ! :laughing:

Takes a little bit of working out the first time, gets easier as PQs need adjusting over time as caches get Archived.

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Maxing out your query at 1000 caches across the entire state is not an efficient query design. You'll want to design queries that return 999 caches or less, so that the query generator isn't picking and choosing which caches to exclude or include. With your query, you could be walking down a trail to find one cache that's loaded on your GPS, while blissfully walking past three others.

 

You can either tweak the radius for a circular area around your home coordinates, divide up a larger area by date-separated PQ's, or a combination of both.

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If you go to http://www.geocaching.com/seek/ and use the query by state, you can figure out how many caches there are in that state. For example, California has 129629 caches. That would take 13 days of PQs to download. (edit : oops, math fail on my part)

 

To split them into date ranges, use project-gc's PQ Splitter tool at http://project-gc.com/Tools/PQSplit

Edited by Chrysalides
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Thanks. I checked it and it was the full 1000 limit. I wonder how many I missed.

You can preview it on the map to get an idea of how far it made it away from your center point.

 

As Moun10bike has pointed out in the past, PQs do not search from the center outward, so knowing how far away the most distant cache is means nothing in assessing the search completeness.

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To split them into date ranges, use project-gc's PQ Splitter tool at http://project-gc.com/Tools/PQSplit

 

You can use a macro in GSAK to do the same thing, but leave out the found caches. If you have found a lot, this reduces the number of required PQs by a lot.

 

No. Unfortunately you must download all caches before the GSAK macro can do so.:rolleyes:

Project-GC's split tool offers all filters that apply with PQs (ie: not found, not on my ignore list, etc. pp.)

 

Hans

Edited by HHL
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Maybe it's a bandwidth issue but other then that, I don't see why Groundspeak can't put out at least a weekly (or daily) list of geocaches by state for people to download.

 

A pocket query of 1,000 caches is roughly around a 1mb... so even California would only be 130mb.... But like I said, that could be too much bandwidth for Groundspeak's servers to handle.

 

I think if they put out a list like that, it would be easier on the servers instead of generating pocket queries one at a time as I think many if not most people would just download the state list.. Then use 3rd party software to narrow the list to their liking.

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