Stu The Hiker UK

What does it matter? The page is static. It doesn't actually monitor the site and report on it. It only changes when someone goes and changes it. The fact that it too is missing tells us a lot more then if it simple reported what we all know. It does matter, and it should matter. It's a status page, static or not makes no odds. If the site goes down then one of the monkeys at Groundspeak can update the status page. Running a status page on the same server, serves no purpose. If the status page says the sites down then true we can find this out fromn trying to reach the site, but if the sites down for an extended period of time then a status page can be updated by a human. That human may also have at hand an update as to what the problem is and what is being done to rectify it. Now I rest my case on the use of a status page and why static or not they need to be hosted some place else

It doesn't matter. Even if it was on a different server, it doesn't update automatically, so it will say everything is just fine until someone goes and manually updates it. However, this usually doesn't happen until the site is actually back up, at which point they'll update the status page to say the site is down! lol...........

Where did you find that information? Post #59......read up

Who puts there site status page on the same server as the site !!! I can't spell roket sience, but come on guys

The only site I can get onto is this forum. I'm finding it sad and rude that when we do get a response, it holds no explanation. It's just one or two lines that tell us nothing "Trust me, if there was an easy and straight-forward solution, we would have implemented it"...........Is hardly informative. I blame myself for the sites problems....It was fine until I took out a premium membership Come on guys. It costs nothing to give us some feedback. Atleast more that "we are trying to resolve the issue" Getting bored now.........

Well five days later and it's still slower than slow... What I find sad is the lack of responses from geocaching.com. The odd few words here and there "is the site still slow for you mr xxxxx", is hardly showering us with information. When we login there should be a splash screen telling us they have issues, what they think those issues are, and what's being done to rectify them. As it is many people are thinking the problems are with there computer or internet, and as a result are going to great lengths to fix things until they stumble on this post or find something in a web search. I've just moved to a premium membership, not to be elite and search for premium member only caches....Which by the way I find sad and creates a split between geocachers. I tooke the premium for the added features, like PQ's etc etc... Premium or basic, we are all suffering when this sites slow then it's slow for all of us. I think it's time that they release a login splash screen telling us what's going on. It will not be a fix but it may calm a few of us down if they take us out of the dark. Upgrades and beta testing used to be done onsite. It's become clear over the years that the updates are rolled out long before they are ready for the world (Microsoft & Apple) being to prime examples. And the old blub we get fed about needs to test it live on millions of users is also nonsense. It's easy enough to create server load and system stress without the need to inflict a cobbled together update on your cusstomers/users. Pull the failing updates, send out a notice, take the code and clean it up. Then spen time testing it before you roll it out...That's the way it should and can be done.

It's been so slow and unuseable for the past few days now. It's just spinning here then times out or loads but fails to draw all the details. I find it sad that they can't be bothered to issue a notice. It's a huge site with many members and staff that monitor the running. They have to know that it's broken, so come on guys 'n' gals......We should not have to resort to Google to find a bunch of other people with the same problems. I reset my router etc etc a few times until I realised that it's not my end

The same for me, I've been useing Memory Map since 2004 and can't fault it. It's great for planning routes to upload to my GPS, and perfect for downloading Tracklogs and a trips waypoints so that I can see my hike overlayed onto an OS map. It's nice to be able to print off just the part of a map that's needed, and nice to be able to pick the map scale, although for me it's always 1:25k. It also does relief shadeing. My only gripe is one of my hiking friends has a later version and any tracks, routes, marks, etc saved on his PC will not load into my ealrier version of Memory Map I've sent a few emails moaning about this but so far I've not even had a reply Memory Map is the way forward, you can even send it to a PDA and carry a digital map about with you, although for me I prefer to print a map and carry a real map and compass and not rely on my GPS and PDA incase they go t*ts up.

Yep, my Canon Powershot A720is takes a boat load of pictures on 2 AA's, and has also served to replace my Sony Handycam for video as it does the same 30 frames a second as the Sony. A camera that runs on AA's and like mine has a viewfinder so you can turn off the juice hungry screen, wins hands down for sure. It's bigger than the Sony that the Mrs has due to hers having a rechargable battery, but when she runs out of juice out on the trail she's not taking anymore pictures until she gets to a mains outlet. I know her camera does fantastic on one charge but when it's dead it will stay dead until we get home.

Wild Boar, Spooked Deer, the odd Adder and panicked rabbits scampering across my path at lightspeed. I've had a close encounter with a Wild Boar when overnighting in the Forest Of Dean, I was woken to the noise of something scuffling about at the foot of my sleeping bag, so on went the headtorch and there looking back at me was a Boar, so in my panic I pulled my sleeping bag cord to fully close my bag and at the same time started thrashing my feet about wildly, making enough noise from my Gortex bivy bag to wake up the other two guys who by now can just see me having some sort of mad episode as this Boar has taken off and they have no idea what's come over me Aside from being spooked by deer and sheep that have been sppoked by me as I bushwack through the undergrowth looking for a suitable place to hide my camp, The biggest scare I've had was one time I was stood in the camp early one morning, with a couple of mates drinking our first morning brew, when at great speed a Deer came from nowhere and was running straight at us, being chased by two dogs, then we went into panic and the Deer spotted us and did a few mad direction changes and bolted straight through the middle of our camp, then the dogs spotted us and slowed down and the Deer managed to get away, and I would always put my money on the deer but these dogs seemed to have the edge on the deer as they came at it from different directions and were making good ground. A couple of years back seven of us rented a cottage in Glen Ure in Scotland, just outside Oban, and one evening we were on our way back from a hike up the side of a waterfall and found that we were surround by deer, and I mean lots of them. I have them on video and you can easy count 250+, and they had no fear of us just stood and watched as we slowly wonderd off towards our cottage. That to date has been my best deer sighting, but also as close I want to get to such big beasts as these guys were. As sid and bob say in there post, here in the UK it's the hoarses and cows that get moody at times. I've been chased over fences by unhappy cows a few times, and have heard from other guys that they've been chased. One time a I was out for a hike with a mate of mine and he stopped to give a hoarse some fuss and then the thing followed us and kept head butting my mate in the back as we tried to make our exit from the field as this hoarse seemed to get more and more upset that we were leaving. I was up in Cumbria a few years ago, up to visit Sleddale Hall (Crow Crag) from the fantastic cult film Withnail And I, and was all set to camp on some nice soft heather and dropped my pack down while my mate went off to investigate the signs that we kept seeing on fence posts in the distance, when he came back telling me that the signs were warnings that the area was littered with Adders that ended up being the worst night I've ever spent sleeping in a car I've got a small one man tent but seldom use it, being under a tarp is great for the view in the morning and that feeling of being outdoors, it also leaves you open to investigation from the animals, but in my eyes it has to be the best way to camp

I had a Nikon Coolpix 2500, till it diead a death earlier this year. It was only 2MP but served me well from 2002. My only gripe was the paper thin recgargable battery and I soon found I had to buy a spare so that I would still be snapping well into my trip. But no matter how cautious I would be with my snapping, I would always run out of juice and without a main supply it's a pain in the a** So when my camera died I opted for a camera that took AA batteries (always available in all stores) and my two other criteria were it had to have a viewfinder and the option of being able to turn off the screen, thus stretching the life of my batteries. I also had to do great video so that I could finaly put my tiny Sony Handycam to rest. Well the Canon does the trick for me, it takes AAs, it takes great pictures, has all the modes that my Nikon had plus lots more, and it captures video with sound at the same framerate as my Sony Handycam. So my advice to people thinking of a new camera is get one with a viewfinder so you can turn off that fancy juice hungry screen. As for solar chargers I've not ventured down that route due to living in the UK and not being blessed with copious ammounts of sunshine, which to be honest suits me because I'm one that likes to walk on a crisp frosty trail and not be boiled by the sun and annoyed by the fairweather hikers, and I use the work hikers with tongue in cheek

Duct tape everytime I always pack a small roll for this reason and many more, list below are some of my reasons for carrying a roll of Duct tape. repairs: tent poles cuts and rips in waterproofs cracked drinks bottles flapping soles on boots if like me one time you fall alseep with you feet to close to the fire and then find that the stiching has burnt away and you can now remould your sole use it to seal poly bags rips in tents, i've got one of my tents and so cheesed off with seam seeler that i've gone over the seam with Duct tape It's always worth carrying, so are cable ties, great for lashing kit onto your pack, and good if straps or buckles and zips break on your rucsack.

15.4 miles in 11.6 miles out It should of been lots less but due to mother nature, the river was too swollen for a crossing due to us getting 84% of that months average rainfall in the past four days. The previous wet weather also hampered our attempts at keeping this route a direct one because the lowlands were bogs that you just sunk knee deep into and to make progress was close to impossible, good old suction keeping us well and truly stuck. Then the thorns, omg the rotten nasty evil thorns, they forced us to abandon going too much off trail. The best part of the day was finding the cache and then crawling into my sleeping bag with a coffee. We managed a more straightforward route on the way back due us knowing that the lowlands were water logged so we had to haul a** up onto the ridgeline which made for some nice views and a rewarding walk back to where we hid the car. You just have to love a good old hike, we never past a single sole and all we could hear was wildlife

So perhaps it's a perpetual motion machine? Or more than 100% efficiency? I thought you got them backwards but then your next sentence confirmed you said what you mean. I got them in the wrong order, I blame lack of sleep

Can you correlate the drift to battery charge? I've found low batteries increase the chance of "bad" points. The walk I do is only 3.5 miles long and I always start it on a fresh set of charged 2300 batteries, and at the end of the walk the battery level is still high. So I think I can dismiss that as being my problem but not sure if that's the same with other units. It has propmeted me to do the walk now a few times with batts that are almost out of charge and see if I get any marked changes in the data and will post my findings here.

I've never had to enter coordinate manualy, only when doing mutli caches, and if you want to save money on the serial cable, then make one like mine, all I used was a lead off an old serial mouse from my bits box and a thin strip of plastic to slide over the contacts on the etrex I can dig out the link to the cable making page if anyone wants it.

Hi all, I'm looking for FREE trail maps and trails for Newfoundland that I can load into Memory Map, then upload the routes to my Garmin etrex H. I'm planning a road trip from St John's to Spehenville and would love to have some detailed maps so that myself and my Newfie girl can stop off along the TCH and do some hilkes. I've downloaded the Geocaches along the way but would love to have some trail maps so that after our trip we can plan some nice hikes through places like Terra Nova National Park. Any help would be appreciated guys

QUOTE Me thinks "high sensitivity" is Garmin-speak for low-precision, i.e. "cheap." Yep.....Have to agree on this one. I have an etrex H and for me it does what I need, but I've noticed the "x-files drift" A couple of times a week I walk the exact same route (exercise ) and mount the etrex H on the top of my pack for the entire journey. My reasons are simple, I can get back and compare previous tracklogs, see how fast I walked certain legs, see how long I stopped for breaks, and basicly get a good idea of how my fitness levels are improving. However it's also made me well aware of this "drift" thing, where some of the tracklogs are spot when overlayed in Memory Map and then other days they're a little bit off and then the extreme where they are all over the place. In some places it will miss part or all of a track and only jumps back on track if I get to a sharp deviation in the trail. It's also had my walking average as high as 62mph ! I've emailed tracklogs and screen shots to Garmin, along with my constant moan that I can only use six characters for naming, but as yet have not recieved a single reply. Now I don't want to rubbish my little etrex H, because it's serving me well, but I do have to agree that it pulls in everything, good and bad and then makes a guess as to where I realy am on the map. Now althought that might not be so good it's far better than they days of having no signal when under dense tree cover. It seems we have to put up with the ups and downs and keep sending feedback to Garmin in the hope that these issues can be fixed in future software updates. As for the etrex H, I will still give it 10/10, even though it sometimes gives me sketchy tracklogs The way I use it with Memory Map serves me well.

The way I look at WAAS is like this.... If I have it turned off I get 20 hours out of my batteries in my etrex H If I have it turned on I get 17 hours So I keep it turned on and always have spare batteries anyway Maybe I should get some sleep before i make anymore posts

Garmin etrex H, cheap and cheerfull and does what it says on the tin. It's on Amazon.co.uk now for £61 with free P&P It's great unit for Geching and great for Hikng. I use it for both without any problems. If you intend to use it for serious hiking you may be put off by it not having any base maps, but for me that's fine because I use Memory Map to plan and upload routes to it and print paper maps.

Yeah a few months ago I went in search of a cache and stumbled on it out on the trail and not hidden. I fugure it had been kicked about as an empty sandwich box, but I recognised it as a cache and after signing the log book I went to GZ and failed to see where it should be stashed, so I hid it in a hole and covered it over and then went home and logged it on the cache page and sent the owner an email but heard nothing from the owner. I put the cache on my watchlist and posted a note telling other cachers that it's not available at the moment......that never stopped some fool going to look for it then complaining that he thought maybe I hid it in a hole !!!! DUH I said in the notes that it was hidden until the owner contacts me. This went on for ages and I was wondering why they never bothered to contact me, but after a few months I got an email saying that they're a retired couple and ill health had put a lot of less important things on the back burner for awhile. So apart from people wondering away from there caches, there's also the ones like you say that have more pressing issues than a 35mm film can

It seems that some people just don't like to play fair or just go out to "trash a cache" A was out with a friend of mine, and he grabbed a TB from a cache with no info on it so we took it home to find out it's goal / mission and soon realised that the tatty old bottle opener that was attached to the tags was not the good looking Dino that should be in our hands. The TB was not even listed as being in the cache that we found it in, but was listed in another cache where a cacher had posted a message to say that the cache should of had a TB in it, but when he looked all he could see was an undated log entry in the book that said "another cache raided by the cache raiders", so it looks like these GPS monkeys are out causing havoc . I was going to call them stupid but they've been smart enough to leave the caches so I suppose then they can muggle from them until the cache gets a bad name and the owner has to retire the cache. The TB owner did post to say that it was missing so we contacted him with regards to sending him the tags back. I'm sat here now with my first two TB's and wondering what will become of them

The Petzl Tikka Plus, is perfect for night hikes and great for around the camp, waterproof and has several light modes. http://en.petzl.com/petzl/LampesProduits?P...3&Critere=0 I had a long and happy six years of life out of my Petzl Tikka, it served me well and when I looked at a replacement I looked hard and long and could'nt turn my back on the Tikka, based on the years of great sevice that this tinly light gave me, so I plumbed for the Tikka Plus, looks the same, but includes a tilt rachet and a fourth LED as apposed the three from the old Tikka, it also takes full advantage of the new hybrid LEDs and is miles brighter than my old Tikka, pushing out 35 lumens of workable light. I've never liked big heavy headtorches that have a strap over the top. The Tikka Plus is perfect for me, it's realy light, and very bright, one set of 3xAAAs will last me a whole weekend. Another nice feature about a single headband headtorch is you can pull it down around your neck, that way it's ready as the darkness starts to close in, and great when you wake up in the middle of the nite and need to go pee, no more looking for your headtorch as it's around your kneck while you sleep. When I need a strong, long focused beam, I use a Dorcy Hawkeye single LED 45 lumens hand torch that also runs on 3xAAAs, and has a wicked bright beam that will send a bright light a good way down the trail, which is ideal for night navigation and if needed search and rescue. Its got a crush proof body and two extra lenses in the tailcap, one blue and one red, and is also waterproof. http://www.dorcy.com/products.aspx?p=414279 For me LEDs give a great return on my supply of batteries and as time has gone on LEDs have been further developed, and that's resulted in an increasing number of people switching to them.

A6: Take your watch / GPSr to the roof of the building, and drop it off. Time the fall to ground, and calculate the height of the building (taking into account gravitational acceleration and air resistance, etc.) (Note: Single use only - make sure you set your stopwatch accurately at the start and finish of the drop!) It would have to be the GPS that gets dropped due the watch having the stopwatch on it btw, Great post, my science master would have loved you

stuthehiker I am a Newbie here looking for basic help, just as you said above! I was looking for some advice on getting a basic GPS to get me started and you have done exactly that. Thank you! I'm off to get my Garmin eTrex H which I think will be just perfect for a complete novice. (although I found my first cache today sans GPS yippeeee!). Thank you for your easy to understand recommendation. Sarah You're welcome Sarah, Drop me a message if you get this unit and need any help with it. Stu,