This post is also available in:
Deutsch (German)
At first glance, Cachetur.no can look very advanced and it is underneath, but it is a very user-friendly service.
Cghove thought he should write a little blog post on how he is using cachetur.no, with some inputs on his settings and how he uses cachetur.no to make a trip.
(Pictures used in this post show English menus, but everything is in the same place regardless of what language you use)
We start with some basic settings
We find settings by clicking on our username top right hand
A little down the page we find settings and API, and here we begin with: Let cachetur.no fetch Personal Cache Notes, this gives us the option to sync personal cache notes from geocaching.com to cachetur.no.
In the time calculation tab we can input in seconds an administration time per cache, ie find, open, sign, replace. This is of course only a advanced guessed average from us since it may vary from time to time, but it’s a number it may be ok to insert since we later will tell cachetur to estimate when we are on the next cache, and then cachetur will include this admin time on top of driving time.
The next tab is trips, here we have 3 choices and the coolest choice to know here is: Factor when calculating time for extra caches, here we choose a number from 1 to 10. And a very advanced formula calculates that at low numbers then there is little likelihood of you stopping to find extra caches that you have not added in the trip, and high numbers are then very likely. And cachetur will therefor add more time between the caches in the estimation. Basic currency is for cost sharing (it can also be useful to spend on trips taken alone to keep track of how “free” this hobby is) and who does not like extended statistics? 😉
These are the settings that cghove feels should as a minimum be personalized, but feel free to take a look at the rest of them.
Saved places
Saved places isa menu option found under Tips and Templates, and the reason I mention this feature is that often we have a fixed departure place, and preferably a fixed ending place, we begin and end the trip most often at home. And then it’s okay that home is somewhere we want trips to start and end but at the same time don’t have to remember coordinates for all the time and it’s possible to add more stored places like the parking lot where you and those you tend to cache with meet before the trip starts
We can save as many places as we wish…
Create the trip
You will see that you can put “tag” Pri1-> Pri3 or blank for caches in your trip. This does not have the big impact on the trip, except that you can, for example, distinguish between caches you want to take, backup caches if you can not find Pri1, or caches you just want to take if you have the time.
Creating a new trip is relatively easy by choosing Trips-> Create new trip, on the menu bar and we will then get to the registration form.
Here in the trip info tab we as a minimum fill in the fields that have a red *.
If we are a little unsure when in future we will do the trip it is wise to tick off: Time is not finally determined (Time chosen below will be stored, but ignored). The trip is then created as a draft, and you don’t have to worry about the trip “auto completing” before you do it.
Furthermore, in some cases it may be smart to check off: All day (time is ignored). This is because if you have planned a small trip to start early in the morning, but expect it to last for only one hour and you oversleep and wake up after the start, then find out that you want to make some small changes, you don’t risk that the trip is automatically set as completed on time.
Pro tip: At the bottom you can choose visibility: Public, private or password protected. Public trips will be visible to all cachetur users, and anyone can sign up. The 2 other options require invitation and or password.
We move on to the Waypoints tab.
As I mentioned initially, we usually tend to have a regular meeting / start-up location for our trips, and we know where we want to go.
Now I will make a trip where I want to start at one of my saved places called start and I have decided that I will go on a trip to Trondheim because I want to log GC7B9VB Kristiansten Festning.
I then start by choosing: Add a saved place and click add behind the saved place I want to start by and since we already know the gccode of the cache I want as a destination I type that code in the field: Waypoint Name, and cachetur will automatically recognize a gccode and thus enter Geocache in the field in the front automatically.
If we have other caches we have been recommended to find on the trip we can also add these now.
In the Settings tab, we can make trip specific changes to the settings we previously saved. For example, we can choose whether cachetur should exclude caches of given priorities, choose whether we want to be routed by shortest / fastest route, avoid tollroads + +….
And we can also ask cachetur to send us an email alert if an event is published along our route.
Click Save trip when done
Generate a route
A few minutes after we hit save we can expect a route to have been automatically generated and we see a nice purple line on the map indicating the road we will drive from A to Z.
Route generation is done externally by a supplier called Graphhopper, and they base the route on data available at Openstreetmap.org.
Error in routes or routes that look strange will most often be due to the cache / waypoints being too far from routable roads or errors in openstreetmap maps. Here, anyone who wants can create an account and fix errors in the maps themselves. It’s also from here, can retrieve data for geocoding. If you’re not comfortable making changes to the map but know what’s wrong, please feel free to send us a message via our Support center or in our slack chat.
Note openstreetmap, may use a couple of days to prosess changes to the maps..
Stay tuned for part 2 of this blog post
This post is also available in:
Deutsch (German)
