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GSAK

Cacheberry for caching with the blackberry.

Currently I use a 8 or 9 year old Dell Axim for my paperless caching which has served me really well but it’s yet another device that I need to keep charged and carry around with me whilst geocaching. I’m about to go caching for the day today starting with the Pi day Party and then hitting about another 10 or so caches with Team JNle4 – yes, I have dragged him out of retirement too!

Anyway, I wondered if there was a geocaching application for the blackberry (work phone) and discovered Cacheberry which looks like it has an offline database, the ability to export field notes via email and also integration with google and blackberry maps.  So today I’ll be using this app and I’ll let you know how I got on.

GSAK stats update

I updated my profile on Geocaching.com this morning using the new Stats macro. There is now a cool feature to add statistics on placed caches. However, as some of my caches in the UK have been adopted, I needed to edit the database to reset the owner back to me as per this post on the forums.
The macros needed can be found on the GSAK macro forum and I used the All Purpose Statistics Generator for the output and the Manage Waypoints macro to load in the logs from my adopted caches.
The end result can be found at my Geocaching.com profile page

Ohio Delorme Challenge

The Ohio Delorme geocache requires a visit to each cache in the Delorme atlas for Ohio but only visits after the cache was placed will count towards the cache find. Once a cache has been found on each page you then get the co-ordinates for the final cache hidden somewhere in Ohio.

With the aid of a KML file, the recent finds pocket query, GSAK and Google earth it is quite easy to work out which pages you need to do.

First download the Ohio Delorme KML file from the main cache page, GCZ554. Next download Google Earth (if you don’t already have it already. Finally  you want a .loc file of all your finds since the 2nd of December 2006 when the cache was placed.  The easiest way to do this is to download your latest finds into GSAK, then using the filters set State=Ohio, Found=Yes, Date=On or After 12/2/2006.  I saved the filter as Delorme so I can run this whenever I need to check my status.

Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_23 PM Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_12 PM Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_16 PMScreenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_31_47 PM   

In Google earth open the KML file and then open the loc file  to see the caches appear in gridlines for each page. You may want to turn off extra options and layers such as road names, community uploaded content etc. This will give you a cleaner picture. Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_32_03 PM

The picture above shows the gridlines and the picture below shows my found caches so far. I’ve actually found quite a few other pages but unfortunately they were before the cache was placed so they don’t count.

 Screenshot - 7_21_2007 , 5_32_55 PM

So far I’ve found pages 45-48,55-59,65 and 67-69

Meanwhile TeamJNLe4 completed all the pages yesterday and now just has to go for the final cache – congrats Jonathan!

GSAK 7 beta and stats

I ran a test installation of gsak 7 on my pc this week. The main reason for this was to install the statistics macro to generate the stats for my geocaching finds. There were a few prerequisites below – links point to the download page rather than the actual file to ensure new updates get downloaded.
First download the cutting edge, most feature packed aka beta version of Gsak 7.
Install the latest patch to bring you up to 7.1 build 64
Finally download the
FindstatGenv3 and whilst you are at it, I would highly recommend the Google Maps export macro too that produces a very cool google maps interfaces to caches.
Once you have downloaded and run the Stats macro, I recommend you download your “My finds” pocket query from Geocaching.com and save the results into a temporary GSAK database. This means the macro has less work to do as it only has to look through one log – yours. Even if you don’t do this the results are outstanding. The stats generation used to take 4 minutes to run in version2 of the macro – it now takes 20 seconds! The output can be seen at my Geocaching.com profile (although this is using the old version stats -I’ve not uploaded the new ones yet)

New caching map tool

I discovered myGME this evening whilst doing some gsak work/experimentation. This gsak macro allows you to get a google map of all the caches in your currently defined filter set with a radius circle predefined to show you the caches within that area. If you want to move the area, you select the red marker icons and move them to the center of the circle and the distance away from the center. It works great. Takes a while to load if you have a lot of caches mind.
The graphic below shows the initial output for the geocaches near Hocking Hills.

myGME exports for Hocking Hills

Cache planning along a route in Autoroute

If you export your gsak caches into Streets & Trips/Autoroute, create a route and then use the Show or Hide places option you can get a list of caches along your trip. I’ve made a rough tutorial online

Keyhole and caching.

Wow – by using the google keyhole software and gsak it is possible to extract data from gsak and create a kml file to import and see a satellite overview of all the caches.
You just need to save the custom export field as
“C:\Program Files\GSAK\GPSBabel.exe” -i gpx -f “c:\program files\gsak\temp\babel.gpx” -o kml -F c:\temp\25.kml