Wintertime

Just a reminder that this class has now started. So far it's perfectly understandable by laypeople! The instructor is emphasizing how important maps are in our everyday lives. There's a video that was produced by WPSU-TV called "The Geospatial Revolution" that has interviews with people from ESRI, the U.S. Space Command, Google, and many other mapping agencies. Part of the video explains how a grassroots open-source mapping area helped people after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good stuff. p.s. I just discovered that the Royal Museums Greenwich are doing a whole series of exhibits and events from now until 2015 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Longitude Act: The Longitude Season There's everything from a steampunk exhibit to planetarium shows to lectures and much more. Boy, I wish I could get to London this year!

Excellent, thanks!

Oh yes, my iPad is perfectly capable of doing that. I've been using it with various mapping apps the past few weeks. I just wasn't sure whether the Geocaching app took advantage of that capability.

Thanks, Tassie, but since I don't have the app, I don't know how it behaves in online mode! Are you saying that, if you've downloaded the map, the app will display a constantly updating indication of your position vs. the location of the cache?

I recently bought an iPad mini that has cellular capability, but I only intend to activate that occasionally, such as for a trip. This means, however, that I got the GPS receiver, and I've successfully tried it with a couple of mapping applications. If I buy the Geocaching app, I understand from the Groundspeak support pages and this thread that while I have a Wi-Fi connection, I can save geocaches, and that will give me offline access to the cache description and apparently to the little map that's on the cache page. But will it save the accompanying .loc or .gpx file? And while I'm in the field, will I be able to view my location (as determined by the iPad's GPS receiver) relative to the cache? Or is all the offline information static and can't interact with the GPS receiver?

Info here: Maps and the Geospatial Revolution No date announced yet. Coursera's courses are free. Usual disclaimer: I'm not an employee or in any way benefiting from sign-ups for this course. Just thought it might be of interest to some folks here. Patty

Thot, you can read the "Ngs Forum Faq" at the top of this forum (the NGS forum was merged into this one a year or so ago), then I encourage you to ask questions in this forum. Because the NGS database is used by professional surveyors, it's vital to understand the correct process, terminology, etc. before attempting to submit recovery reports.

One advantage of the ScaredyCat site is that it has links to both the Gc.com and NGS pages for each mark. The GC page often has photos, plus more up-to-date logs than the latter.

You can look here: Scaredycatfilms but the nearest mark in the NGS database I see to your specified cache location is about 1/4 mile away. From the text you mentioned, it sounds like the mark was set by a private surveying company.

Nat, I just tried California and it worked fine. Also, I looked at your profile and it appears that you're in North Carolina, so I tried that and there were lots of benchmark pins on the NC map.

It's under "Resources" > "Maps and Diagrams" in the lefthand navigation bar. You were able to do a search that included the term "PID"? I've always gotten an error message when I've tried to search for any words or acronyms of fewer than four characters. Really helpful when trying to find geocaching or benchmarking information for Mac computers or GPS devices. Patty

I know that if I drag a geotagged photo to Garmin's Basecamp software, a little image of the picture shows up at the appropriate location on the map.

The recent change from "Cache Name" to "Cache Starts with" on the Hide and Seek page is causing me some problems. I appreciate that the old method of matching the search term with any part of a cache name often resulted in loads of irrelevant results. So I have no issue with that being the search method for cache names offered on the basic Hide and Seek page. But the Advanced Search page should allow for broader keyword searches, not just the same "starts with" search. I often hear about a cache and only remember part of the name. Now, with this change, if I don't know the first part of the name, I'm out of luck on searching. I'm not asking for full Boolean search capabilities in the By Keyword option on the Advanced Search page, but please, let us search on something other than the first word of the name!

Battle Mountain, Nevada. That sign has been there for decades at least. I remember seeing it when my mom and I were driving to Montana in 1962.

Amen!!

I was going to delete this thread since no one had even viewed it and the NGS DB is working again now (almost a week after I noticed it not working). But there doesn't appear to be a way to delete the thread, so just move along, please... :-)

As Edrick and I were discussing in another thread several days ago, we're getting the following error message when we try to submit a recovery report on the NGS website: Program message: Could not open Sybase connection to NGS Server NGSBASE. Exiting from the program. I've tried with three different browsers on two different devices with the same result. (Not that I suspected a browser problem, since the error message is clearly coming from an NGS database.) I've thought of dropping a note to Deb, but I'd wager that some professional surveyor has already alerted her, so I don't want to bug her about it. Just curious whether anyone else here had tried submitting a recovery report in the last week, and if so, whether it worked.

Have some folks here been filing reports on the fly while they're out hunting? I agree with you; I wouldn't want to do that even if I had the capability. On a related note, the same friends I was with when we were trying to find the CPOP mark had put some benchmark app on their iPhones that included a button to log a find. I haven't gotten a look at the app yet to see whether it logs on the Gc.com site or actually submits a recovery to NGS. I'd certainly be skittish about the latter, if people don't understand the protocols involved with NGS reports.

Oh, thanks Ernmark, I'll think about that. If anyone else here has visited the station and wants to turn it into a waymark, they're welcome to do so.

9:52 a.m. PDT on Friday and I still can't submit a recovery report...

On our way home from the Mojave Desert last week, some friends and I stopped at a Caltrans rest stop near Buttonwillow to find the 2000 California Center of Population marker. The actual COP that year was a few miles northeast of the rest stop in someone's field. Presumably this location was chosen for the marker because of easy public access. Incorrect coordinates were posted for the mark in this forum a couple of years ago; those coords put it on the wrong (northbound) side of I-5. The actual coordinates, in geocaching format, are: N 35° 25.056 W 119° 25.466 I'm attaching some photos of the disk and its environment.

Hi, Edrick. Aha, you're right! There's a line on the results page that says, "0 Items," so I, well, thought it had zero items. But just now I tried touching the ellipsis at the far right of it, and darned if that didn't open a drop-down menu with the expected results. We couldn't even get to the NGS website at first until one of my friends realized that we needed the "www" at the beginning of the URL. Most websites these days have aliases so that users don't need to include that part, but apparently NGS doesn't, sigh... BTW, piggybacking on my mobile-device issue, I can't seem to submit a recovery from either my iPod or my desktop computer. I keep getting the error, "Program message: Could not open Sybase connection to NGS Server NGSBASE. Exiting from the program." Anyone else seen that error today?

Some friends and I were in central California last week and I was trying to find the location of the California Center of Population marker. I had forgotten to load the coords from the NGS website, but I thought it would be easy to find at the rest stop. When I didn't find it after looking for a few minutes, I asked my friends to use their iPhones/iPad to search the NGS database. We got into the site okay, but whenever I searched for part of the station name, the results came up empty. As soon as we got to our destination and I tried on my MacBook, I got results just fine. Does anyone have any idea why we might have had trouble accessing the database via a mobile device? Has anyone else had this problem? I don't think NGS is using Flash, but even if they were, that would affect our ability to use the site, not its ability to search the database. It was a very weird problem...I suppose it could have been a temporary problem with the database that happened to clear up by the time we got to our friends' house, and thus had nothing to do with the devices we were using.

Yes, I know. That's why I was asking whether you were using coordinates derived from USGS quadrangle maps. Makes life a lot easier than just trying to go by the description! Okay. Well, for the second one, did you find a hairpin turn and then a culvert north of the road? Once you've gotten situated there, you should just be able to use the distances to zero in on the mark. If you don't have any coordinates to help you. Yeah, that's for sure! In this case, if you can no longer find a culvert at the hairpin turn, perhaps the road was expanded. What program are you using to put crosshairs on the topo map to derive coordinates for the benchmarks? Patty

"frex3wv," sorry, I haven't read this whole thread, but what kind of help are you looking for with those descriptions? They seem quite straightforward to me. Also, are you only going by the descriptions, or have you derived coordinates from the locations of those benchmarks on the USGS topo maps? I do the latter when I want to find a mark that's on a USGS quad, and it's been a very successful method for me. It's also very helpful even when a mark is in the NGS database if its coords there are scaled; use the coords from the topo and you'll save a lot of time finding it!