JohnCNA

President Bill Clinton removed selective availability in 2000. Selective Availability (SA) was an intentional degradation of public GPS signals implemented for national security reasons. In May 2000, at the direction of President Bill Clinton, the U.S government discontinued its use of Selective Availability in order to make GPS more responsive to civil and commercial users worldwide. https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/#:~:text=In May 2000%2C at the,ever use Selective Availability again.

You can add 'Data Fields' to your compass or map display. My favorites are Pointer and 'Distance to Destination'.

V 1.2.29 Build 1995 Started an AL and selected our first location. Set for the compass display. Distance showed as meters instead of feet, as I have always used it. Went into Profile/Settings and saw 'Use Metric' was turned off, same as before. Turned the Metric option on and turned it off again. Then the compass finally displayed miles/feet. So apparently it isn't recognizing that setting after the update. This happened on both my Android and the wife's iPhone today.

You will usually find a list of the associated geocaches on the GeoTour page. Your first geocache listed takes you to: https://www.geocaching.com/play/geotours/south-downs You'll see in the upper right corner of the page the option to download a GPX file or create a list with the required geocaches.

How are you getting the red icons? I'm getting the plain "waypoint" dot when importing the GPX from GSAK.

I don't understand the difference between Multi-GNSS vs Multi-Band, but my Samsung S20 phone shows that it receives GPS, GLONASS and GALILEO satellites. Using the app GPSTest, it shows reception from all three.

A group of 11 cachers in the Chicago area created ALs that cover the entire 160+ miles of the Lincoln Highway across Illinois and extending into Indiana.

We noticed the other day that while zooming in, some of the details like trails disappeared. Zooming out a step or two or three and the trails showed up again.

I did not mean to come across as ALL Labs should be easy. Just that we decided to make OURS easy. Just like caches, some should or will require more effort than others.

When a group of us created AL's along the Lincoln Highway, some of the AL's cover distances greater than 10 miles. It would be quite annoying to have to backtrack that far to get a bonus cache, as well as being forced to start from a particular direction. We did not see any real reason to force people to follow a particular order. We all made them non-sequential for that reason. Most of us also placed a bonus cache that was fairly close to one of the AL locations and gave the full coordinates at that AL stage instead of giving partial clues at each stage. Yes, it means you could only visit a single AL stage and then get the bonus, without visiting the rest of the AL stages. In practice, we're not seeing that happen. If the AL is fun or interesting enough, players will want to visit all the stages whether there is a bonus or not. Our philosophy was AL's are supposed to be fun and simple. If you want challenging, put out a 5-stage Multi instead. ?

I had this happen twice in the past, where I was getting legitimate emails for someone with my exact same name and in the other instance, a very similar email address. In one case, let's say my email address was John!Public@gmail.com. When I contacted Google to see if they could help, they said that they ignore punctuation in email addresses. So John!Public@gmail.com, John.Public@gmail.com, John-Public@gmail.com would all go to the same inbox. I don't know if that is still the case, but I found that very surprising. It ended up that the other person had the address of John.Public123@gmail.com and he had forgotten to add the 123 when registering with a couple businesses.

Cell reception is extremely important. A couple times when I was in a spotty reception area, it would not accept my answer.

it is not necessary to use up all 5 or all 10 spots. That's just the maximum limit.

You aren't required to use all 5 locations if there are not 5 useful or 5 interesting things to use for clues. There's nothing wrong with a 3 or 4 location Adventure Lab.

I'll certainly agree with that! We're spoiled with fairly sophisticated search and filter tools in geocaching. And there are none in AL's. We can only hope that some searching and filtering will eventually get added.

I'm a little offended by categorizing this as a power trail, where you find a pill bottle every 528 feet along a bike trail. Every stop in this series brings you to something historic and educational, heralding an event that transformed our country and economy. The longest single AL section of the series is about 30 miles and has 8 stops along the way. Makes for a fun and interesting road trip that can easily be broken up into sections. Is this classic geocaching? Of course not. Neither are Virtuals, Earth Caches or Events. I think it's a lot closer to many of the GeoTours which are often hosted by a local tourism office. They are mostly interesting and educational but usually are not much more than pill bottles with logs,although some may have a commemorative coin for completion. And yes, there will be frivolous examples such as the Donut Shop Tour that's (I think) in Ohio. I'm not sure where the concern or angst comes from. AL's are not cluttering up the geocaching maps, don't fill up our PQ's or require any extra filtering in GSAK databases. If you're not interested and choose not to participate there is no impact on classic geocaching, except for the occasional bonus cache that shows up.

If you tap on the icons, it will tell you what it is for. Many are for the concrete road markers and other not-so-interesting stuff. But that's where you find the interesting stuff, like interpretive gazebos, murals, etc. And there are no concerns with geocache proximity; Adventure Labs can be created anywhere. Two of our interpretive gazebo stops already have a geocache located inside. Hey, it's a two-fer that way.

One of our group posted a map screenshot of all of our stops along the way. I'm not aware of a search function other than panning the map to an area and tapping the icons that pop up. Our AL locations are (east to west) : Merrillville IN Dyer IN Chicago Heights IL New Lenox IL Joliet IL Plainfield IL Aurora IL North Aurora IL Maple Park IL Malta IL Franklin Grove IL Sterling IL

I suggest looking at the Lincoln Highway Association map to see LH items of interest in your area. Once the map is opened, you have to turn on 'Points of interest' to see the LH related items in your area. California's map looks pretty 'busy'. ? https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/map/ An interesting part of the story... A friend and I had received an AL credit but were trying to decide what to create. He had a couple LH memorial things near him and mentioned that. Aha! I had a couple near me, too. Several others in our local geocaching Facebook group picked up on the conversation and also had an AL credit they were trying to decide what to do with it. My friend started up conversations about this on a couple FB groups and there were soon a dozen or so people participating. GCHQ eventually got wind of this grass roots project and to support it, they upgraded all of us from 5-location AL's to 10-location AL's. That made it a lot easier for us to cover the entire 160 mile distance through Illinois. Anyway, California on the LHA map looks like:

I have had excellent results with JB Weld Plastic Bonder, a 2-part epoxy made especially for plastics. But it bonds metals to plastics very well, too.

10 Illinois and 2 Indiana geocachers got together and created 12 Adventure Labs following the entire Lincoln Highway through Illinois. Border to border. Plus one section over the line in Indiana. These 12 Adventure Labs stretch just over 200 miles. The Lincoln Highway has hundreds of commemorative gazebos, murals and other historical monuments and artifacts along the way and is an interesting historical marvel. Anyone in the other states want to pick up where we left off? The entire length of the Lincoln Highway runs from Times Square in New York to San Francisco, a total of 3,389 miles. How cool would that be to have labs covering coast to coast? Our job was made easier by using the great map by the Lincoln Highway Association. Turn on 'Points of Interest' in the Layers Menu, and it shows hundreds and hundreds of Lincoln Highway locations. https://www.lincolnhighwayassoc.org/map/

After testing my Adventure Labs, the app now shows a black icon on the map where our Labs are. I have deleted the Test in the Builder, but the black icons remain. On my Android phone, I have found that going into Settings, Apps, Adventure Lab and clearing the cache and data will get rid of the black icons on the map. This deletes my login information as well, so the next time I run the Adventure Lab app I have to log in again. Looking on my wife's iPhone, it appears that the only way to clear the cached data is to delete the app and reinstall. Is there a better option or a setting in the app somewhere that can clear the cached data? Or does it automatically refresh the data at some point? This would become necessary if one would edit their Adventure Lab after it has been made Public, too.

Would it be possible to create a Challenge Cache that requires completing several Adventure Labs? The only way I can think of doing that is having a bonus geocache on each Adventure Lab and then creating a challenge cache that requires finding all the bonus caches.

I noticed today that some of the Adventure Lab icons have a star or gear icon. What does that signify? New? Has a bonus cache?

Thanks for the clarification! That's good to know.