PQ date ranges

[GSVNoFixedAbode]

Morning all,

The Plan: off to France (few days) and UK (few weeks) for sightseeing and some caching on the side.
The Equipment: Oregon 550, HP netbook
The Caveat: only 50% of the party is keen on caching so this won't be a hard-out hunt, but a "do a couple while we're here" technique for each day/location
The Task: I need to build up a GSAK database of Parisian and UK caches before I head over so I can load up the Oregon the night before with any relevant hides for some opportunistic caching.

So, rather than spend ages of trial and error, does any one have a list of date ranges for PQs that would cover the UK?

Cheers,
G.
Dunedin, NZ

[martybartfast]

Can't help you with the date ranges, but do you realise that there are currently over 82,000 caches in the UK? so even if you got the dates to match perfectly you'd need 82 PQs to get everything and allowing for overlapping on dates you're probably looking at running a hundred PQs to get the whole country, and by the time you've done that there will be even more.

I think you'd be better off concentrating on the areas you expect to visit.

[GSVNoFixedAbode]

I'm intending to limit caches to Trads/virtuals/events (just in case ;-) but as we're travelling through Southern England, Wales, bit of Ireland, northern England, Scotland, and back to London over 3 weeks we cover a fair bit of area.

Ideally I'd have an iPhone and big data package to simply download caches wherever we stop but haven't been able to go down that particular technological branch.

Cheers,
G.

[martybartfast]

Ah, ok well I guess that's pretty much the whole of the UK then! You could probably get all the events & virtuals in 1 PQ, as for the trads, maybe someone will be along with some date ranges - good luck and I hope you enjoy the trip!

[border caz]

Not sure what you mean by date ranges?

What I would do is use the netbook to run PQs each evening, or maybe once every couple of days, for the areas you're visiting, and download them into GSAK, then stick them on the Oregon as needed.

You could do it before leaving home but if you do the whole of the UK then I suspect you'd be getting a vast volume of data for caches you wouldn't be going anywhere near - and by the end of the holiday it would all be 3 weeks out of date and you could waste time going for caches that have been disabled, archived or had co-ords changed.

[martybartfast]

Not sure what you mean by date ranges?

What some people used to do, including me, was set up a series of PQ's which would collect all the caches in the country, you did this by setting up queries like:

PQ1 - caches placed between 1-jan-2000 & 31-Dec-2002
PQ2 - caches placed between 1-Jan-2003 & 10-Oct-2004
PQ2 - caches placed between 11-Oct-2004 & 19-Nov-2005
.....


and tweaking each date range so that it would return just under 500 caches (or 1000 nowadays), in the past people would make the date ranges public for others to use to set up their own queries (which is what the OP is looking for), and as the dates became more recent and cache density increased then the range for each PQ became smaller.

However as caching has become more popular it became less feasible to do it like this. The last time I did it (a year or so ago) a single month was returning 500 caches so I stopped bothering.

[Ryuchan]

What some people used to do, including me, was set up a series of PQ's which would collect all the caches in the country, you did this by setting up queries like:

PQ1 - caches placed between 1-jan-2000 & 31-Dec-2002
PQ2 - caches placed between 1-Jan-2003 & 10-Oct-2004
PQ2 - caches placed between 11-Oct-2004 & 19-Nov-2005
.....


and tweaking each date range so that it would return just under 500 caches (or 1000 nowadays), in the past people would make the date ranges public for others to use to set up their own queries (which is what the OP is looking for), and as the dates became more recent and cache density increased then the range for each PQ became smaller.

However as caching has become more popular it became less feasible to do it like this. The last time I did it (a year or so ago) a single month was returning 500 caches so I stopped bothering.

its around 5/6 days now for a 1000 result pq. That's just placed by date.

op needs to just look where he is and run pq's on the fly 1/2/3 days prior, you have a netbook, it aint that hard, seriously.

[Bear and Ragged]

If you're asking for my opinion...

I'd be tempted to work on "Caches Along A Route", or caches around where I'm staying...

Or look out for any 'interesting' caches, based on age, good logs, interesting location, etc.

edit to add:
I'd also be tempted to exclude caches with 'Needs Maintenance' and include caches that 'Have been found in the last 7 days'