“Using Multi-million dollar satellites to find
tupperware containers in the woods.”--nucci6

GSAK Tips and Tricks

Pocket Queries

At the very least, to really make a cache manager application worth it's weight, you must take advantage of the Pocket Query capability within Geocaching.com. Pocket Queries are simply jobs that run on the Geocaching.com servers to create files containing all the GPX data for up to 500 caches. You can base the queries upon location, difficulty, terrain, and many other options to ensure you recieve exactly the types of caches you are interested in. The large file that is e-mailed to you can be imported into GSAK in one quick and easy step. This is a lot faster than downloading each caches GPX file from the cache page and importing them one at a time.

Don't make the same mistake I did when first setting up your pocket queries. I selected the option to only send me caches that were active, obviously since I didn't currently care about caches that were disabled or archived. The problem came into play when a cache would be disabled or archived after I've already imported into GSAK. The next pocket query would skip the cache and I would never know the cache was disabled unless I went to Geocaching.com. While my family and I were out traveling I saw we were close to a cache and thought I'd make a quick park and grab, twenty minutes later I gave up a little frustrated that I couldn't find an ammo box in a pretty easy search area. When I got home to log the DNF, I saw it had been disabled and archived about four weeks earlier. I know get both active and inactive caches so that my cache manager is always up to date.

TomTom Integration

TomTom

POI Exports for Garmin GPSMAP60CSx

POI

Cachemate Exports

Cachemate

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