As mentioned in my posting our GPS equipment, we’re running, and loving, GSAK (Geocaching Swiss Army Knife) on my HP laptop at home. When we’re out and about, if needed, we take Andy’s retired Dell which he hooks up to his Lowrance iFINDER® GO2 Handheld GPS and I have Okta Touch (PPC) with the OnCourse Bluetooth GPS Receiver Edition 3 on that we’re running TrackyPRO (see our TrackyPro article) for navigation and CacheMate (see our CacheMate article) for cache listings / information.

GSAK:

Homepage: http://gsak.net
GSAK is without doubt the Geocaching Swiss Army Knife. If you’re using this at home for managing caches then you have a everything you could ever need or want and it’s only ever a mouse click away. If you’re a Geocaching.com Premium Member and make use of the Pocket Queries then seriously consider taking GSAK for a test drive as it provides everything you would ever need to know about a cache including date placed, last found, last log, placed by, distance, difficulty, terrain, container size etc and if it’s a cache you have found it will also include the date of your find. Importing your Pocket Queries is so simple, File > Load GPX/LOC/Zip and you don’t even need to unzip them first! Within minutes you will be up and running with a full, comprehensive list of caches based on your PQ. Caches you have found are easily spotted as they are well marked by colour, as are caches you own and if you’re on a Travel Bug hunt you can also see which caches may contain a bug, including which TB was placed there with a link to the TB home page listing.

GSAK is a real time saver, with each and every cache imported, all the information relating and relevant to it, is just a mouse click away. There is no need to wait for page loads nor do you have to fight it out with the speed of your internet connection but if you do find you need more details GSAK provides the full Geocaching.com URLs so everything is always right at your finger tips.

We’ve imported 250 caches and what’s super cool about GSAK is that if we are after a quick run or want to plan a day trip we can sort the caches by distance, if we want a run of low difficulty caches you can sort by difficulty or terrain, if we’re after older (or new caches) you can sort by placed date, there are so many options available that within a few cache hunts you won’t know how you’ve lived without it all this time… and that’s before you even have a chance to check out what else it can do…

“GSAK is the all in one Geocaching and waypoint management tool. Major features include: Multiple databases, sending/receiving waypoints to GPSr, Google maps, conversion to many mapping formats, PDA output (including CacheMate support), HTML output, extensive searching, macro support, backup and restore, distance/direction from other waypoints (including caches, locations, post codes) and much more.”

…you can check out a full list of GSAK features here and get a good look and walk through of the main GSAK screen and features here.

In GSAK, when you click on a particular cache, it brings up a full copy of everything you would see at Geocaching.com including the original listing details, hints, log entries and a Google Map based on the co-ordinates provided, but what’s super handy for us is that the Google Map provided by GSAK on each cache listing is fully useable so you can zoom in / out and navigate your way around the cache location checking out possible parking spots and other areas of interest.

GSAK is available for download at http://gsak.net, it has 21 day unrestricted trial period after which point you can register it for US$25, or be faced with a nag screen. Opt for the warm fuzzy and buy it though, if you are in any doubt about why you should part with your money just check out the registration page for a list of extremely valid reasons. GSAK also has a downloadable Getting Started Manual (well worth getting) a support forum and great FAQ section

Now onto what we are running on our PPC which enables us to venture towards paperless geocaching…

CacheMate and TrackyPro