Paperless Caching

WARNING: Construction Zone!

A lot of people cache simply by printing out the cache pages from geocaching.com, and that's how I started. However, I'm a gadget geek, so it was inevitable that I would begin caching paperless, by storing the cache information on a PDA. For me it is a lot more convenient, as I cache intermittently, and it's a lot easier to store several hundred cache pages in my Palm than it is to have the pages laying around.

 This is how I go paperless. There are other options out there including GPXspinner and Plucker. I use the equipment I had, in particular a Palm Vx, so some of my choices have been directed by that.

Paperless Caching with a Windows PC and PalmOS PDA Step by Step

 

1. Become a paid member at Geocaching.com. It costs $30 per year, but for that money you get to define 'Pocket Queries'. Pocket Queries are pre-defined searches that the system runs automatically, and e-mails to you. You can certainly go paperless without having pocket queries, but it is much more tedious, as you have to select and download waypoints individually.
2. Download PC-Side software. I use the following software on my laptop to manipulate the GPX files: ClayJar's Watcher, EasyGPS and GPSbable. With these programs I can merge and massage the waypoint data before I upload it to the GPS and PDA. I find that Watcher is better than EasyGPS at helping to sort the data, and mark caches as 'found' or ignore the caches. I think it also does a better job at merging multiple data files into one. However I have noticed that once I've opened a GPX file in watcher, I need to save it as a LOC file or else EasyGPS will only show the first cache in the file.
3. Download and install CacheMate for the Palm. I moved away from Plucker because it required an active connection in order to load the data. CacheMate can import LOC and GPX files directly. Registration for this program is only $7.00, very reasonable.