[Az-Geocaching] New Feature

[C. Sullivan]

On Fri, 3 May 2002, Jason Poulter wrote:

> dont upload all the waypoints to the gps only upload the ones in the 
> general area you want...

That's of limited utility as opposed to just checking them off screenful
at a time off of the actual geocaching.com site. 

One of the nice things about having all the caches in your GPS reciever is
if you are out wandering it allows you to "spontaneously" decide to go
Geocaching.  With the GPS reciever and the Palm files, I can decide to go
hunting any time I have a few spare minutes.  Like yesterday, I found
myself in the southern parts of Tempe with about an hour to kill.. just
asking my GPS reciever to "find nearest waypoints" lead me to find two
caches in that hour.

A Metro Phoenix version of the file would be very handy for this.  As the
vast majority of geocachers (I'd guess, anyway) live in Phoenix and it's
environs, it would be very handy to allow this kind of unplanned
adventuring.  The number of Geocaches within, say, a 50-mile radius of
Phoenix is substantial, but not nearly as huge as the file would be
including the entire state.  Since the file is currently just about 40-50
waypoints short of fitting in my eTrex Legend (and I gather a lot of other
smaller recievers as well), it's getting big enough to be a problem.

If I'm planning a Geocaching Adventure (say, my recent trip to Flagstaff),
I just tick off the waypoints off of Geocaching.Com and upload them
seperately.  Why do all the work in EasyGPS if I don't have to?

A coding solution would be easy to implement (you can mathematically
figure where 50 miles from a certain target coordinate is) and would
improve download performace for modem users as well (and reduce bandwidth
from snaptek), because the file would be appreciably smaller.

It's a good idea all the way around.

-Fedl