Are you a new cacher just "giving this geocaching thing" a try for the first time? A cacher who only hunts a couple of caches every now and then? If either of those apply to you, then having a clipboard with some cache page printouts might be practical, so you can stop reading right here because the rest of this article will be of no interest to you.

On the other hand, do you break into a sweat if you drive by a known cache location but can't stop and hunt for it? Would you rather leave the house without your wallet (or purse) than your GPS? Have you become such a cache addict that the office supply store delivers paper by the truck load to your house because you are printing out so many cache pages? If this describes you then read on because I'm about to try and unlock the mysteries of PAPERLESS CACHING for you. Making the plunge to paperless is easy. All you need are two basic things:

1) A personal digital assistant (PDA)

2) A Premium membership a Geocaching.com

If you don't already own one you should know that Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs for short) fall into basically two main camps "Palm Pilots" or "PocketPCs". "What's the difference?" you ask. To keep things simple, we'll just say hardware & operating system. Palm based devices (Palm Pilots, Sony Clies, Handspring Visors, etc.) are built around hardware that runs PalmOS. PocketPCs (Compaq iPAQ, Casio Cassiopeia, HP Jornada and others) are built around hardware that runs a version of the Microsoft Windows OS.

Programs written for these devices are not compatible because these devices are built around different hardware and operating systems (think Apple vs. PC). Therefore, you need to know what you want to use your PDA for before you buy one. For the sake of this discussion we are going to say that all you want one for is paperless caching. Also for the sake of this discussion, since I own and use a Palm IIIxe, we are going to say that your choice is a Palm compatible PDA.

OK, we've narrowed your choice down to a Palm based device. I guess the next question is "What are the minimum requirements you should look
for?" Even though a basic Palm with 2MB of storage would work, a better choice would be to spend an extra $15-25 and get a Palm device has a minimum of 8MB ram. I currently have 2100 cache pages loaded into my Palm (via the program CacheMate) and they take up approximately 3.7MB of available ram.

Something else (besides price) that make s older Palm III's attractive for caching is that they use a RS232 serial interface to "talk" to your PC (as opposed to news models that have a USB interface). Why is this a good thing? Well, CacheMate has a plug-in that allows you to send waypoints from your PDA to Magellan GPSs (more on this later). For Garmin users, as best I know there is also a Garmin plug-in for CacheMate. I don't own a Garmin so this really isn't my area of knowledge, but I do know that there are Palm apps (and cables) that can let your Palm and Garmin GPS transfer information.

Besides helping support geocaching.com the best reason to spend $30 for a premium membership can be summed up in two words POCKET QUERIES. Pocket queries (PQs) are the magic that makes paperless caching happen. If you've already been caching for a while then you are no doubt familiar with .loc files. Well with pocket queries you have your choice of 2 formats to receive them in, either Mobipocket ebook format or .gpx file. These files are like .loc files on steroids! Besides having cache waypoint coordinates (all that is in a .loc file) the ebook file and .gpx files have cache descriptions, hints, the last 5 cache logs, information about if there is a travel bug in the cache and more.

Well the Mobipocket ebook format sends you your PQ in a file that displays on your Palm in a manner that looks pretty much like the cache pages look in your web browser. It requires that you load the (free) Mobipocket viewer on your Palm. While it is kind of cool to feel like you have the gc.com website in the palm of your hand (so-to-speak) this is actually your least desirable option (in MY opinion, your mileage may vary). Why do I find it less desirable ? Mostly because the Mobipocket reader app is a space hog weighing in at about 850kb. A 500 cache PQ can be almost a 1MB. On a 2MB Palm that's about all you will be able to install. Please feel free to try this option for yourself (you might like it) but for me it just doesn't work.

So what does work for ME? My choice is to get my PQ as a .gpx file. This file format can be read by EasyGPS or Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (so you can send all of those waypoints to your GPS) but more importantly it can be used by Plucker or my favorite Cachemate. I will not try to discuss the pros and cons of all of this software in this article. Instead I'm going to focus on the combo that works best for me Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (GSAK) and Cachemate.

Finally I get around to telling you how to do it

You will want to begin by downloading and installing Geocaching Swiss Army Knife (GSAK) and CacheMate. You will then have an icon for Geocaching Swiss Army Knife on your PC desktop (Figure 1) and an icon for CacheMate on your Palm (Figure 2).

Now you need to go to Geocaching.com and create a pocket query . There are all kinds of options that you can set to filter just the caches you want. After making your selections the important part is at the at the bottom near the Submit information button (Figure 3).

Figure 3

You want to make sure that where it says "In The Format" you click on the dropdown and choose "GPS Exchange Format (*.gpx)". If you forget to choose this you will be sent the default .loc file which will only contain coordinate information. Next (unless you REALLY the Mobipocket eBook) make sure that 'Also eBook Format (for handheld devices)" is NOT checked but that "Compress files into *.zip format (recommended) IS checked.

You will then (depending on how busy the GC.com servers are) shortly receive an email with you PQ that will look something like this (Figure 4).You will then unzip that file to some easy to find location (C:\PQs\ works well for me).

Figure 4

Now you are going to go to your PC desktop and click on the GSAK icon (Figure 1) to open Geocaching Swiss Army Knife. From the menu bar you are going to select File > Open GPX/LOC... (or press CTL-O). That will then bring up the file selection dialog box (Figure 5). Navigate to where you saved your .gpx file to and click OK.

Figure 5

GSAK will then bring up a status bar as it imports the file into your database (Figure 6).

Figure 6

When it is finished it will give you some information about what it did (Figure 7).

Figure 7

Now you can either export all of that cache information to your Palm or if you are space limited (own a Palm with only 2MB of storage) you can use GSAK's filters to filter those caches down to something like all of the caches within a 10 mile radius of a specific cache (Figure 8 ).

Figure 8

Now we are finally ready to transfer that data to your Palm. On the GSAK menu bar you will want to go to File>Export>CacheMate PDB file (Figure 9).

Figure 9

From there the Export CacheMate PDB file dialog box will appear. Give your file a name and tell GSAK where to write it to and most importantly check the box that says "Install to Palm after conversion" (Figure 10). and then click the Generate button. GSAK will then create the file and inform you that the next time you "HotSync" your Palm, the file will be imported into your Palm.

Figure 10

OK we're in the home stretch now. Just a few more minutes and you'll be ready to start paperless caching. First you will need to HotSync your Palm. After the HotSync is complete launch CacheMate on your Palm by tapping the CacheMate icon (figure 2). This will then bring up the Import database dialog box (Figure 11). You can either leave have the caches store in the default "Unfiled" Category or you can choose another by tapping the down arrow next to Unfiled and choosing another catagory (I put mine in Not Found).

Figure 11

When you tap OK CacheMate will begin importing the database (Figure 12).

Figure 12

When the import is complete you can view caches by Name (Figure 13) or Waypoint (Figure 14).

When you select a cache there are 5 different pages available for each cache - Info, Description, Hints, Log & Past Logs (if any).

Well that should hopefully get you started on the road to paperless caching. I know it looks hard and like a lot of steps when you see it here but trust me it really isn't. Once you've done it a couple of times you'll find that it takes less than 5 minutes to get a PQ with 500 caches from your email to your Palm. That's about the same as it might take you to print 2 or 3 pages. Keep an eye out here for future updates to this article (or possible new articles) as I explore other features and uses of CacheMate like how to make it and your Magellain GPS talk to each other so that you can transfer waypoints when traveling without a laptop.

After you log your finds in CacheMate be sure to go to the Geocaching Express Logger for CacheMate at http://boulter.com/geocaching/logger/ and follow the directions for uploading you CacheMate logs. It's a very quick and convenient way to log you finds. I'll cover it more in my next article

Until then happy caching from Clan_Barron.