Hopsahi Harry

Wisconsin

An E-Trex Legend! Cool! I have one, too and it is a fun toy...tool, I mean. Eraseek has a pretty good answer. I find that when the satellites that are on line are scattered all over the place, I get good accuracy. However, when they are all bunched up, it doesn't seem to matter how many are on line, accuracy suffers. That's even true with the WAAS satellite (#35) correcting some of the other satellites (they have the "D" on the bars). And as the others have pointed out, I've stumbled all over the woods and found nothing, even with good accuracy, and vice versa. Either way I enjoy the hunt.

I enjoy the mapping feature of my E-trex Legend. It helps get me near the cache ("Which street do I want to turn down? Oh, that one will work!"). But, once I get really close, say, 100 or 50 feet, the mapping is pretty useless, and I have to follow the bearing, distance, and "the Force" to actually find (or not ) the cache. Maps are fun. Do it if you can afford it.

This is a bit of a spoiler, but my first (and only) cache is like that. The help is really appreciated. Thanks

I have a cool location for my next cache. The only problem is that it is subject to Spring flooding. I would like to retrieve the cache prior to the flooding, then replace it after the flooding is past. How does one "deactivate", then "reactivate" the cache?

I figure extreme is in the eye of the beholder. If it's extreme to you, then it's extreme to me, too! I'd love to hear about any and all.

West Central Wisconsin. We have a few of those critters that "rattle your nerves", too in the bluff area near the Mississippi River. Haven't seen one, yet, though. Great stories. This is so much fun!

Last time I went out to search the elusive cache, the temps were in the teens, with a brisk wind blowing. It was chilly, but tolerable. Now that, up here in the Midwest, the temps are in the "Holy buckets" below Zero, and wind chills in the "Oh, my God" below Zero, I thought "Wouldn't it be cool (no pun intended) to bundle up, blast off and seach for a cache that's under a foot of snow!" Maybe at night, too. Let's hear your "extreem geocaching" stories. (There I was, on top of Mt. Everest, a full load of satellite signals, hanging on with my bare toes to reach a cache under a ledge... Well, OK fiction is fun, but...)

I haven't used my waas very often, usually because that last satellite won't hook up very often. When it did, I got some pretty impressive accuracies (like 10 feet), but still found myself shoving the GPS in my pocket so I could concentrate on looking at the ground. It is just too darn temping to stumble around looking at the GPS display!

I tried to upload a pic of a web cam cache. I found that the pic was in bitmap format (.bit, some 600kb's!), and that saving it in JPEG format brought it down to under 100kb's. The pic still looked good, too.

Clearly, your GEEK-O-METER needs more scale. How about attatching an external antenna to your hat with a big document clip or something? I'm sure that won't peg out (max out, maybe) the geek-o-meter. Then you could put the GPS just about anywhere you want without losing the signal.

I finally found, I mean really found, my first Benchmark with the GPS. I picked one whos coords. were set by geodedic methods, rather than scaling off a topo. I walked right over the darn thing twice before I quit looking at the GPS and started looking at the ground! Now, if I can only find a cache! Since closing words of wisdom seem to be all the rage (I sure somebody wrote it first, I just dreamed it up one day): "You have the most to gain by facing that which fears you the most"

Thanks for the advice. After changing the datum, I went and "found" the BM, again. Now, I'm only off by 100 feet! Much improved, but my Magellen 315 should do better. I'll re-enter the coordinates, and find the BM, again, and see what happens. Not so lost in space, anymore.

No way could I find my first cache, though it should have been easy. Then I went to "find" a Bench Mark I already knew about only to discover my GPS was off by about 1/4 mile! Turns out my GPS was using the wrong datum. (Datum? What the heck is Datum? Ohh, now I know what that is...) Words of wisdom to first cachers...first "find" something you know the location of, this checks the performance of your GPS. Then you're off and running. Wish I had.