lotacus

I use Geocache navigator on my BB 8110. I found my particular BB to be way more accurate than my garmin 60CSx, down to 0.7m, of course, that doesn't help when someone places a cache with an accuracy of 10 meters or so. LOL. The only draw back is battery life. Having the software constantly polling the GPS chip, and the cellular chip working, drains the battery quite quicker, Though I did manage to get five hours of caching from a battery charge.

I've read a few posts, and I believe it's come down to laziness. Ratings are done by the people who hide the cache, which makes the rating more flawed than any other system that would be in place. A rating system that used percentages, is not a flawed system and not easily abused. Cachers have better things to do than to abuse a rating system, we like to explore and find the caches. This is not a "RATE my face site". I've seen caches, especially micros, rated as 1 when they should be 3+ The rating system is subjective to the person placing a cache, so its natural that they will under rate the cache which makes it not very accurate. There are different ways the rating system could be implimented like a starting rating as set by the person placing a cache, and an actual rating by those who rate the cache once logged. Yes DNF's are going to give it a higher difficulty rating, which is legit. People re-visiting or experience cachers are going to give it a lower rating. It all plays the role in the over-all rating, that is how it's supposed to work. A more simplistic rating would be to set a minimum rating based on cache size. A lot of people seem to be taking the rating suggestion the wrong way. IT IS NOT TO RATE HOW GOOD THE CACHE IS. You don't rate a lamp post cache as 5 (highest difficulty). That is not what it is about. It's about rating how difficult the cache was for YOU to find. So much controversy over a stupid difficulty rating system it's rediculous. It seems that there are some very childish geocachers, which is probably a good thing that if any self rating sytem is to come in place, that it be only available if either a person has first reached a certain amount of found caches, or to premium subscribers.

well, it seems that late last night around 11:30pm and again today around the same time as yesturday when I got the really good readins, that these new readings now appear worse than they have. Now I'm getting poor accuracy readings from 12m to 37m 4-8 satellites. So something is going on. I guess yesturday was some sort of fluke.

I dont know what it is but it just started happening today and I didn't update my blackberry software at all, and so far it is still reporting the same results. but i'm definatly not complaining.

Just today, starting at approximatly 10am up to now (will check later in the day/night) I noticed something quite striking. I turned Location on in my Blackberry 8110 and refreshed the readings to notice that it reported an accuracy reading any where between 1.8 meters and as low as 0.9 meters. At first I thought this was probably a bug as I'm used to seeing anywhere from 3 meters up to 9 meters. I refreshed several times and walked myself to Tim Horton's. While there, I refreshed several times and the accuracy was still reporting as ~1 meter or less. I loaded up Google Mobile (which has GPS capabilites now! yay!) and started walking back home while watching it follow me using aireal maps. Even though GMM reported the location accuracy w/in 3m (probably the lower limit programmed by Google) Looking at my location on the map appeared to be extremely more accurate than what I was used to seeing. For example, before, it would show me as walking on the road when I was on the sidewalk, however, now it was showing me walking either on the sidewalk, or more accuratly as close to the sidewalk than before. I still don't know if this is an isolated occurance or if it's just the positioning of the satellites at this time of day, but I've never had this much accuracy even with my Garmin GPSmap 60CSx. Unfortunatly I don't have that anymore to verify if it's just my Blackberry reporting the accurate readings or if other GPS devices are having the same wonderful luck. A few things crossed my mind. Could it be the time of day? I ruled that out because i've never in years had a reading of 1 meter or less. Did they launch another satellite? Fix, tune, upgrade the satellites? Did the military still have some sort of degradation still imposed on the signals that they removed? Or could the Blackberry be including previous location information as part of it's calculation? Now, I know you will probably ask how many satellites did it have a fix on? Well, the least amount of satellites was 5 the most 8, so that doesn't make any sense since I've had a fix on 10 many times with 6 meter accuracy, and last year a fix on 12 with my Garmin with 3meter accuracy. Oh, and AGPS has always been disabled because it is not even close to being as accurate as true GPS. I'm located in St. John's Newfoundland Canada So I would like to know if anyone is experiencing the same phenonema?

oh fun! just what I was looking for! I'll be leaving for the East Coast trail within two weeks or earlier... for inner-self personal reasons, i've decided it was something I needed to do. I am geared toward the entire developed portion of the trail which I believe is over 300Km's but under 400, but it still extends far beyond that, I figure I will be doing a lot of roughing in the bush and I will be gone for some time so survival is very big on my list, so I'm studying survival guides etc, on snares, gathering water from local sources etc. I think that alot of the caches will help me mentally on my travels and keep me going. I figure that since I will be out for about a month (two months round trip) It is pretty pointless to pack much that I can otherwise get in the trails.. small game, water, shelter etc.. yea, good old basic army survival. I suppose it would be natural instinct from modern living that I would want to bring all that I can that are not really necessities, after all, the pioneers and natives didn't have such luxeries that we call necessities. I guess I will pack what I can as if I was going out for only a couple days, to ease the psychological transition, plus I could always refuel if absolutly needed. I just need that ECTA TOPO guide. I can't seem to find it in St. John's.