There has been some discussion here lately about the benefits of Charter
Membership. It doesn't matter to me who is or who isn't a paid member,
but there are a couple of new developments now available to charter
members that you may want to know about (and which I first read about on
the geocaching.com list server).
Easy one first: Charter members may now maintain watch lists on an
unlimited number of caches (other accounts are limited to 100). No big
thing, but it's new.
Big one last: The "pocket queries", which let you generate more complex
search logic like "All the physical caches I haven't found that are
terrain 3 or less within 50 miles of my house", will now permit you to
receive your query results as a GPX file. This GPX is an extension of
the XML programming language just for Geocaching. (And, it should be
noted, it is NOT the same GPX that is the file format used by EasyGPS
and ExpertGPS. Although both programs can READ these GPX files, they
cannot currently save any changes in the new standard.)
So what? I hear you ask? Well, because this standard gets past the
incompatibilities of file formats from competing GPS vendors and
software manufacturers, people are now writing freeware (so far) to
leverage the information contained in a GPX file. I've played around a
little bit with three of them. I'll just describe what they do, I'm not
reviewing them.
Garmin owners may find EasyMPS very handy. It takes a GPX file and
creates a new file in MPS format, which can be directly opened in
Garmin's MapSource software. No more downloading from EasyGPS into your
GPSr and then uploading into MapSource. You can find the latest version
at
http://caching.iancowley.co.uk.
GPX Spinner is a Web site (
http://www.gpxspinner.com/spinner.pl) that
uploads your GPX file and "spins" it into almost any format you might
want to download into your GPSr. For instance, instead of having all the
waypoint IDs start with "GCxxxx", you can tell it to spin virtual cache
IDs into VCxxxx, multis into MCxxxx, or whatever you want. You can even
strip the two letters off altogether. If your GPSr field is big enough,
you can add the difficulty/terrain ratings into the waypoint field.
There's even an option to use difficulty/terrain ratings from 1-9
instead of 1-5 by halves, so you only need one character for each
rating. There's other stuff as well, but perhaps the other major
facility is the ability to store all the output on the Web (go see a
sample of my query's output at
http://www.gpxspinner.com/caches/index1-AZ.htm). If you drill down to
one of the cache pages, you'll notice this output is much more compact
for printing than the geocaching.com web pages. And if you've got a PDA,
you can download these pages directly into your PalmPilot using a free
program like AvantGo or Plucker for the Palm, and similar stuff for
Pocket PCs.
Finally, I've tried Watcher, which you can download from
http://www.clayjar.com/gc/temp/. This runs on your local PC against the
downloaded GPX file. It produces a sortable, searchable list of all the
caches in the GPX file, and even lets you link directly to any cache
page on geocaching.com. I've attached a picture of a little bit of the
output. I tried to make it as small a size as possible without making it
completely unreadable.
There are probably more offerings in the works, or already available, as
well. Those are just the ones I've tried.
Now, thanks to Brian and Jason we have a lot of this functionality right
here on azgeocaching.com. But if you're traveling out of state, you can
have the same great information for caches anywhere in the world. But
you need to be able to download pocket queries to get the GPX files, and
you need to be a Charter Member to download pocket queries.
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