TheAlabamaRambler

Every issue has extremes. In this case you have on one end of the scale cachers with almost no capabilities and on the other you have folks who are slightly disabled. You can't rate anything for everyone's specific abilities. In between those extremes is a middle ground. For a rating to mean anything it should address the middle, and each cacher can determine their distance from that middle ground. I am going to propose that most folks in a wheelchair can handle gentle slopes, dry dirt and hard-packed gravel, and impediments such as an 8" curb or ditch. I would further propose that most folks in a chair can reach the ground and can reach up to five feet. Folks who cannot do those basic things will probably not be caching alone. Common sense will then enable any able-bodied cacher to determine the degree of slope one thinks a wheelchair can negotiate, could a chair bump over that impediment and so forth. That gives you an easy-to-explain way to rate the cache's accessibility that anybody can evaluate. When you try to get it more granular you get into each person's abilities, and there's just no way to rate that. Soft or Muddy ground? No Gentle slope? Yes Extreme slope? No Curb, ditch or other barrier less than 8"? Yes Cache located 5' or less off ground? Yes If the overall cache hunt experience matches those basic answers use the 1 Terrain rating and the WC Attribute. If not then give it a 1.5 or above Terrain rating.

Excellent response! They've opened the door, now you need to go through it. Offer a plan something like this: they set up and establish the cache, they would own the listing, then you will set a watch on it and do the regular maintenance of it. That way they have control of what is on their property but do not have to task staff with the maintenance.

The suggestion I have made re the issue of able-bodied being able to rate a cache for wheelchair access is to rate it for the lowest common denominator. Most folks are familiar with an office chair on wheels. I tell them that if they can roll it to the cache and find it without getting out of the chair then it is wheelchair accessible. Obviously that's not a great analogy but it does give folks an idea of what a person in a wheelchair can reach.

I have several plastic cache boxes out. One is a Plano brand, the rest, including one that has been in the woods for 5 years now, are branded MTM. I paid ~$9.00 for the MTM brand at Academy Sports and like them better than ammo cans. Google "MTM Sportsmans Dry Box"

To get a trackable number you buy a Travel Bug. http://shop.geocachi...s-2/travel-bugs

I disagree with that idea. I've had this talk with others, and to do that (IMHO) is the same thing as saying that those in a wheelchair can only do the easiest of the hides. I have known some non-cachers that could take their powered wheelchair "off road" through grass, soft sand, mud and one time a very rough and uneven feild. If they were to become cachers they would be finding hides from 1/1 to 2/2. Here is a link to a site that shows what someone in a wheelchair can do. I'm not clear on how a 1/1 Wheelchair Accessible rating would be interpreted as being the only rating a cacher could do. To me that's like saying accessible buildings are the only buildings the handicapped can enter. I don't see anyone making that interpretation. Having been in a chair since '99 I am fairly familiar with what exceptional people can do. My profile should give you an idea of what I can do from a chair... plus I am an avid outdoorsman, camper, fisherman and hunter (two turkeys and four whitetail deer so far this season). And that's the crux of the problem. I know what I can do but have no idea what you can do, thus how do I rate a cache in a way that is meaningful for you? And it's not just ability, the rating has to consider dedication. I'm willing to drop out of my chair to the ground and scoot up muddy hills on my fanny to get to a cache. I have no clue whether anyone else would do that, so how do I rate it? 'Accessible if you are willing to crawl'?

There is a Wheelchair Accessible attribute. http://www.geocachin...bout/icons.aspx Getting folks to consider and use it is the problem.

The problem with HandiCache ratings is that every disabled cacher has different capabilities. I lost a leg in '99, can't use a prosthesis, and broke my neck in '03, so I mostly cache on crutches. When I do use my wheelchair I can go places most wheelchair-bound folks can't. Even if I use my chair to get to the cache I can stand to reach it. My problem then is to evaluate whether someone else can do those things or do I rate it for the lowest common denominator; someone in a chair who cannot hop curbs or stand up? For that reason I have shied away from rating caches on Handicaching.com... I simply don't know how to go about giving a meaningful rating. That and the fact that I've found thousands of caches in 26 states and can probably count the number of truly accessible caches at less than 100 (excluding LPCs).

The Online Geocacher magazine would be happy to publish articles on geocaching safety. In fact a regular column on the topic would be welcomed. Anyone interested in the topic is invited to submit articles. Send them to me or to onlinegeocacher@gmail.com

No. You're saying (hypothetically) you watched spoiler videos online, then complained that I spoilt a cache for you?

Handicaching.com is a great site that hasn't caught on as well as I expected it to. Getting the able-bodied to consider the disabled in their listings will certainly help. Getting Groundspeak Volunteer Cache Reviewers to require that the cache rating of 1/1 be reserved for wheelchair accessible caches would help even more, but I don't hold out much hope of that happening. One thing that you can do is use the linking code at http://handicaching.com/linking.php to put links to HandiCaching.com in forum posts, listing pages and logs... anywhere that you can to help get the word out! The Online Geocacher Magazine is always looking for geocacher's stories and we would love to have articles submitted by handicapped cachers to help raise awareness. If someone wanted to write a regular column on disabled caching that would be wonderful!

The company was doomed from the beginning. LightSquared must have not done their reasearch well enough. I'm a radio operator also, and I understand that spectrum of the issue. I also understand how much the DOT and the Shipping industry relys on GPS to move goods across the US. The DoD never put much input on the subject. I was concerned enough to write my State represenative about the subject. What was the FCC thinking? I can't fault the FCC for this. LightSquared asked for a waiver to operate high-power terrestrial-to-terrestrial in a band dedicated to low-power satellite-to-terrestrial and it was granted provided that LightSquared prove that their system did not interfere with existing band users. The underlined portion is the important part. The FCC Waiver requires proof that interference will not occur. Of course their system does interfere, LightSquare's waiver is invalid, and LightSquared has to move to a band where it will not interfere with other users. But, licensing bands where the LightSquared system will not cause interference are very expensive. LightSquared cannot operate profitably in those bands. They want to stay in the much less expensive band where they are now. So they blame GPS manufacturers for not building in filters which would protect the low-power GPS signals from their high-powered signals and try to bully the FCC into giving up their no-interference clause in the waiver! They state that it is their 'right' to change the function of that spectrum to suit their needs and GPS users must change to accommodate them. LightSquared created a media campaign designed to bamboozle Congress with junk science. Their argument is totally specious and the FCC knows it. LightSquared will never be able to operate their new system in that spectrum. The GPS manufacturers do, as required by the FCC, filter out interference that is normally be expected to occur on those frequencies, but it is not the GPS manufacturers responsibility to filter their devices from such a strong signal as that of LightSquared which was never anticipated to operate in that band. Yes, it will be the end of LightSquared because they will not be able to afford to license frequencies where they can operate without causing interference.

The account that creates the listing is the Cache Owner. That person (account) is responsible for attesting to Groundspeak that the cache meets the guidelines, is the account with whom Groundspeak communicates re any issues, and is the person responsible for maintaining the cache. Shared ownership would only confuse that picture. As you have discovered the Cache Owner field on the listing is just a text field, you can put whatever you like in that field and that's what will appear on the listing, but it is the account that is logged in and creating the listing that Groundspeak holds to be the owner.

Do you mean eleven years of fantastic viral international success, a great game for millions of players and the meteoric rise of a company like Groundspeak? Yeah, I'd keep doing that!

It's just a turf war. There's plenty of frequency bandwidth available or that could be made available elsewhere in the radio spectrum that they can use. From: http://cqnewsroom.bl...to-protect.html (QSY is radio-speak for change frequency)

That's pretty much my approach to any cache.

What StarBrand said. If anyone sees me and asks what I am up to I explain the game, give them the geocaching.com address and my contact info and tell them if they have any questions about getting started to call me. Any cache owner who places a cache in a high-muggle area has no right to any expectation that you will play his silly stealth game.

Oops, wrong thread.

That's my normal way of doing things. Completely unstructured. I load 1000 caches into my Garmin 62st, pick a cache to start at and just keep hitting 'Next Closest'. No telling how many I will find or where I will end up, but that's the way I like it. Cache runs, as you've found out, are a blast as an occasional activity. I've done six or seven 100-cache days over the years, all with a carload of folks who started out strangers and ended up friends, all an absolute howl.

No doubt! Thanks for getting that out of the way!

I am trying to use my home, GC14B0Z or somewhere very close to it as the starting point. None of the numbers are fixed, but most are minimums. What I would do is run a PQ to find all the webcams within 125 miles of the start point and make a list of the ones I wanted to attempt in GSAK using a filter to select only caches NW, N and NE of the start. Then run a PQ of Virtuals within that criteria and add that to the list, and so on for each cache type to create what I would call a Master List. Then look at the Master List to figure a route that would get us to at least 3 Webcams, 9 Virts, 4 Letterboxes and 16 Challenges. Then along that route I would choose other caches to assure that we find at least 80 caches for the day. Some will be disabled, some we won't find, so we'll select say 100 target caches total. This Target List now encompasses all of our goals and we just need to optimize the route to get them all in the shortest possible time. I would import that list into Street Atlas and let SA optimize the route for us. A 100-mile PQ centered on GC14B0Z containing just WebCams, Virts, Earthcaches and Letterbox Hybreds nets 119 caches, of which 73 are W, NW, N or NE of the starting point. Of those only 11 are Letterbox, 6 are Virtuals and none are webcams, so I would pick a cache in Huntsville (~100 miles North of Birmingham) as the center point for another PQ. Or, not having found any WebCams in north Alabama, take them off the list of things that can be accomplished in our 24 hour period.

True, and I have done that several times. I did however state that we would start at my home here in Birmingham. I think all but the Farthest North goal could be accomplished within the Birmingham MSA and certainly if we select caches on a vaguely Birmingham to Huntsville route.

I'm sorry if the time frame confuses folks. By one 24-hour day (period) I mean, for example, from 9 a.m. Saturday to 9 a.m. Sunday. That includes parts of two calendar days but is only one 24-hour period. There's not likely to be a way to drive 700 miles and find all of the caches in 24 hours. Time spent driving takes away from time spent caching so you want the route to be as short as is possible. In 2005 my team found 315 caches in that same 24-hour period but we drove less than 30 miles to do it. Using that example we would leave my house (GC14B0Z) at 9 a.m. Saturday and stop caching wherever we happen to be at 9 a.m. Sunday. Hope that helps!.

We already have this tightly moderated forum, the loosely-moderated Off Topic forum, Clayjar's Chat and several Geocaching-Facebook pages and I don't see a huge percentage of geocachers using them. If you look at the forum posts and Clayjar's chat you will see it's really a small number of cachers who regularly participate. I'm all for it, but I suspect that I'm in the minority. Maybe promote the use of what exists rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. As far as Facebook (or any other internet site) privacy, don't post anything you don't want the whole world to see! Just as when you leave your house you have no right or expectancy of privacy, the same is true online - when you hit post you have opened it up for the world to see.