All About Geocaching?

It doesn't come easy wonders: "While surfing the net, I ran across this commentary on Geocaching by Erin Joyce. My wife is keen on trying Geocaching one of these days and I began to wonder if anyone on Slashdot participates in this pastime? If you do, what do you use (equipment-wise) and what's your opinion on the sport?"

Comments

Have you tried the FAQ?

[artifex2004]

Nifty little FAQ right here.

Personally, I think it's fun, except when I see a lot of people walking noisily to a location, with a handheld GPS out in the open, etc. The idea is to be circumspect and enjoy the environment or the weird urban places you visit, not how quickly you can cross a cache off your list as a hit. And when you're obvious about it, people who aren't geocachers might go looking for the cache and destroy it or walk off with it. It happens a lot.

I've gone a few times

[Marxist Hacker 42]

My equipment: PocketPC with Bluetooth, NavMan GPS Bluetooth module, iGuidance mapping software for urban/vehicle Geocaching, Maptech Pocket Navigator for foot/bicycle. You want good hiking software; sometimes following coordinates alone can lead you through the bushes, when there was a perfectly good trail coming from the other direction! Depending on your target- boats and folding shovels are optional. Sometimes a calculator is good for finding that next waypoint in some of the more puzzle-style caches; I just keep a copy of DIV calculator on the PDA.

Of course, I'm into the tech- technically, all you need is one of those cheap $50 recievers that gives you your current coordinates, speed and direction. But that's doing it the hard way.

Re:I've gone a few times

[Marxist Hacker 42]

And if you have the time, my equipment will let you do that too- it's a menu option in most of the software, but it's also a separate free application with the Bluetooth GPS driver.

My one problem, I've yet to find a good way to carry everything- I'm thinking about putting some velcro on the shoulder of my ScottEVest so I get better GPS data (just velcro the GPS unit to my shoulder, turn it on and off I go).

Re:I've gone a few times

[sporktoast]

If you think that you want a shovel to geocache, you'd probably better re-read the listing guidelines:
"Caches may be quickly archived if we see the following ... Caches that are buried. If a shovel, trowel or other 'pointy' object is used to dig, whether in order to hide or to find the cache, then it is not appropriate."