GEOCACHE COORDINATES

[Mez]

I am new to geocahing. Yesterday when I looke up sites on the Geocaching Australia website I found the coordinates of caches that I wanted to look for. I searched for two, found one. Today I can only find a GC number e.g. GC2KWQW. I have read that the coordinates are in the WGS84 datum. This is all double dutch to me. How do I find the coordinates?
Mez.

[AussieCacheHunter]

For ones starting with GC you can click through to the external site, and the coordinates will be there.

[jonnosan+2]

Just to be confusing, there are a couple of different websites with caches on them.

One is geocaching.com (which is based in the USA and has cache listings from all over the world, including Australia)
The other is geocaching.com.au (where you are now, and ONLY has australian caches on it)

The geocaching.com.au site (often called GCA) does include listings of caches from the geocaching.com site, but for those caches it won't show the cache coordinates. There should be a link you can follow though that will take you to the same cache listing on geocaching.com which DOES include the coordinates.

You can distinguish geocaching.com caches because the code always starts with a GC whereas the GCA caches always start with a GA

[jonnosan+2]

Also, you can ignore the bit about WGS84 datum. What it means is, over the years there have been a few different standards (called datums) for specifying coordinates, and the same coordinate in different datums can be hundreds of metres from each other.

But nowadays everything (including smartphones and whatever GPS you are using) uses WGS84.

[CraigRat]

To see caches on the other site you also need to be signed in (you need an account there, your geocaching Australia account won't work for you over there!)

[Mez]

Thank you to AussieCacheHunter, jonnosan+2 and CraigRat for all your helpful advice. I'm on the right track now but know where to come if I get stuck again.
Mez.

[Kerry]

Also, you can ignore the bit about WGS84 datum. What it means is, over the years there have been a few different standards (called datums) for specifying coordinates, and the same coordinate in different datums can be hundreds of metres from each other.

But nowadays everything (including smartphones and whatever GPS you are using) uses WGS84.

Well yes "GPS" or should we now call it GNSS is based on WGS84 or at least the latest version of WGS84 but whatever GPS (in generic terms) you are using will be dependent on what datum the user has configured and who only knows what some of the users have configured? So no not everything is actually putting out WGS84, it is putting out what the user has told it to put out, there is a difference.