Wintertime

I've got a really nice little geocaching system set up and am really happy with it. I have MacGPS Pro on my Mac, CacheMate on my Palm, and a Garmin III+ GPSr. I recently became a premium member and love being able to get GPX files for CacheMate. I'm going to get a cable so that I can transfer data from the Palm to the Garmin, but it would also be nice if I could extract cache locations from GPX files and use them to map the caches on MacGPS Pro. But that program only seems to accept simplet text or LOC files; the extra information in GPX files appears to be confusing it, and it isn't able to extract waypoints. Does anyone know of a way for MacGPS Pro to get waypoints from GPX files, or will I have to send the waypoints from the Palm to the Garmin and then up to my Mac? Thanks! Patty

Well, I'm in the Bay Area and Zhanna is in Pennsylvania, so I'm afraid that neither of us is in a position to ask around about a benchmark in (real) northern California. You might try posting a question under its own heading here in the Benchmark forum, or in the West/Southwest forum if benchmark questions are allowed there. Patty

And thanks to Zhanna for all her work in organizing the files for easy retrieval! Also of course to the nice person at USGS in Colorado who sent me the sheets in the first place. As she mentioned, some of these marks are in the NGS database and are therefore listed on Geocaching.com. I'm going to start going through those and posting a synopsis of the 1986 recovery report along with a link to her page so that anyone who's interested can read the details of those reports. BTW, I was really hoping that the 1899 benchmark at Stanford would still be there, but I found the location where I'm sure it was supposed to be, and it looks like that stone pad has been overlain with concrete. I don't know whether the benchmark was removed before the concrete was poured, or is still under there somewhere. Some of the benchmarks at USGS headquarters are gone, too, but some are still there. Patty

Ooops, sorry, you're right. I guess "parallel" isn't used for meridians. :-) :-) Me, too! I wish whoever is responsible for latitude and longitude lines (some U.N. agency?) would smooth them out! Except maybe for the Prime Meridian and the Equator; you want to notice when you go over an important line like that. :-) Yeah, it would be easy to get a foot caught up in the crossed lines. Wouldn't be too bad in areas where a lot of people go by, but a latitude/longitude intersection in the middle of nowhere--well, you could be stuck there for days before anyone came by to help! Patty

Say, has anyone put together a DRG map of the entire Bay Area? I've been downloading 7.5' and larger maps from the U.C. Davis DRG server, but of course they all divide at the 122nd parallel, which is about *this* far from my house. I can probably find some way of gluing them together, but just thought I'd see whether anyone else had already done it. I can use TIF/TFW or PICT files; maybe some other formats would work, too. BTW, Becky and Dave, I'm going to Disneyland just after New Year's, and then to Walt Disney World the following week. Yippee! I'm really looking forward to seeing the holiday theming on the Haunted Mansion and It's a Small World. Patty

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. I do know how to use a soldering iron, but I think this time I'll leave it to folks who have successfully made the necessary cables already. ;-) The cables on PC-Mobile.net come in two parts, so they'd be great for someone who wants to switch between two different GPSr units with one PDA, or two different PDAs with one GPSr. However, since I only have one of each, I can go ahead and get a dedicated Zire 71 to GPS III+ cable. I sent email to one of the Pfrank folks, and he verified that one of their cables will be perfect for that. So I plan to order one of those. And just a couple of weeks ago I was asking someone why he would want to connect his Palm to his GPSr. ;-) But that was before Brian created a plug-in that lets CacheMate users upload waypoints to a Garmin. Now I have a reason to connect the two devices! Patty

Like it says....does any company sell a cable that would allow my GPS III+ (round four-pin connector) to connect to my Zire 71 (Palm Universal Connector, whatever that is). Now that there's a CacheMate plug-in that supports communications between Palms and Garmins, it might be nice to have that capability. Thanks! Patty

Interesting topic! I'm glad it got bumped up where I noticed it. Dave or anyone, I understand most of the key legend on the http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/INFO/COP/ map. "Set" means a state marker has been installed. "Interest" must mean the state has made noises but not done anything yet, and "No info" would mean there's been no response from the state. But what do "ADJ" (adjusted?) and "GPS" mean? I looked at the drawing of the New Jersey mark, and it didn't have any GPS coordinates on it. Patty

Hi, everyone. Okay, thanks for the encouragement. I'll post short excerpts from the 1986 reports on the pages of the benchmarks that exist on Geocaching.com, and I'll include a link to Zhanna's page so that folks can find the full report (and the original monumenting reports). I'll do all this after she has the 1986 reports uploaded. Thanks again to her and to GeckoGeek for their help with scanning and posting the 100+ pages of USGS reports. And thanks to ElCamino for explaining the "SFNF" designator. I wouldn't have known what it meant had the USGS guy who sent me the reports not explained it! BTW, there are a very few cases where the notation on those pages is incorrect; i.e., when you go to the actual 1986 report, the result is the opposite of what was written in the margins of the old reports. If any of those are among the ones listed on GC.com, I'll make note of it when I post my comments on those pages. Patty

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, I've received a bunch of reports from the USGS about the results of a benchmark search they did in Yosemite in 1986. I have reports for Yosemite Valley, the Wawona/South Entrance area, and points in between. I thought I might go through the reports, find ones that correlate to benchmarks that are listed on Geocaching.com, and post notes on those pages about the results of the 1986 survey. Unless there's some other important information, I would just post one sentence summarizing the team's findings. It's fine with USGS for me to post the information; I just wanted to be sure it would be useful to the benchmark hunting community before I did it. Okey dokey? Patty

Do you have further information about that? I can't find anything about survey mark CDs on their web site. Does the CD cover all three USGS regions, or just Eastern? What information does it have about each benchmark? Thanks! Patty

BTW, I just received the latest update to MacGPS Pro (v. 4.0.4) and I notice that it now supports Magellan as well as Garmin GPS units. As I mentioned, I'm really enjoying this program. Patty

A few weeks ago, I bought James Associates' MacGPS Pro, plus a cable to connect my Garmin to my Macs. I tried everything out on my Power Mac, then took my PowerBook to Yosemite with me. I had a *great* time. I had also bought JA's CD of Yosemite topo maps and waypoints, which I was able to enhance with the waypoints I took myself. The whole thing worked very smoothly in both directions (PowerBook to GPSr and GPSr to PowerBook). I have since found an online database of California 7.5' maps and have downloaded some for my part of the Bay Area. Again, the waypoint uploads and downloads are working great. Patty

I just wanted to thank everyone for your help with this. My friend decided to purchase a Garmin GPS V, the newer version of my III+. He hasn't integrated it with his Mac yet, but will probably do so sometime in the future. For myself, I bought MacGPS Pro and a Mac-to-Garmin interface cable from James Associates, and I love it! I also bought their Yosemite CD, which comes with a full set of USGS 7.5' topo maps plus a file containing about 500 preconfigured Yosemite waypoints. When I was at the park a couple of weeks ago, I took my PowerBook and happily uploaded and downloaded waypoints as I searched for benchmarks and virtual caches and took waypoints for my own virtual cache. Everything worked great. I've now ordered a Palm Zire 71 and will soon be getting CacheMate and MacCMConvert for it. I'm also going to become a premium member of gc.com so that I can get those lovely files of multiple cache waypoints at once. ;-) Thanks again for the advice! Patty

If your cache has a theme, it's great to offer an FTF prize that's related to the theme. For example, someone recently placed a cache in my area that required decoding Morse code to get the coordinates, and they put a pair of two-way radios in the box as the FTF prize. (Yeah, I know, they should have used straight keys, but they probably figured that few people would want those. :-)) A friend and I are working on a cache that's about a certain area of the Sierra Nevada, so when I was in that area recently, I found a nice pewter keychain that has a map of the area. Patty

While I was in Yosemite National Park for a long weekend, I managed to find eight benchmarks--mostly intentionally, a couple accidentally. ;-) These two are in the GC.com database: HR0698 HR0710 The others aren't in the database, so I've put them on a Yosemite Benchmarks page on my web site. (There are actually two benchmarks called 72+60.05; they're on opposite sides of Northside Drive and have different elevations. I didn't include closeup photos of them because I plan to use them as questions in a multistage virtual geocache I'm putting together.) Please feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions about these benchmarks. Patty [This message was edited by Wintertime on October 29, 2003 at 10:51 PM.]

FWIW, I've been using the following simple method with my Canon PowerShot A70 (3.2 Mp): * Download photos to Mac. * Open the photo I want in Adobe Photoshop Elements (the little brother of Photoshop). * Crop the photo (if needed). * Resize the photo to 6" wide or high (an arbitrary number I've settled on for no particular reason ;-)). * Resize the resolution from 180 to 150. (180 is what I normally shoot in unless I need a photo to be really hi-res for some reason. 150 is arbitrary.) * Save the file under a different name with medium compression (setting "5" in Elements). You can see some of my resulting photos at http://www.geocaching.com/mark/details.asp?PID=HR0710. Patty

quote:Originally posted by ArtMan:But what about the question of adding non-NGS marks into the geocaching.com database? As far as I know, there is no mechanism to do this. That's right, there isn't such a mechanism on GC.com. That's why I'm looking for someone who's willing to post these benchmarks on their own web site. If someone can do that, then I'll give up on the OCR idea and take up GeckoGeek on his kind offer to scan the 140 pages of reports. Patty

Yes, I have a scanner, but as GeckoGeek says, the old typewritten stuff from the '30s is horrid--it's umpteenth generation and smeary already. I don't think that posting scans of the pages would accomplish much. They need to be captured with OCR equipment and then hand-checked to correct any errors. Patty

A few weeks ago, I contacted USGS to see what I could find out about their survey marks, most of which are not included in the NGS (and therefore the GC.com) database. A nice man with USGS in Colorado ended up sending me mark information for the quads that run along the bay from Palo Alto to San Jose. The listings range from 1899 to 1968, and there are probably a couple of hundred marks listed. Then he sent me more than 100 pages of information about marks in Yosemite. Some of those pages are listings of the original reports from the 1930s (those have 8-10 marks per page); others are reports from an extensive recovery effort in 1986 (two reports per page). Some of these marks are in the NGS/GC.com database, and I'm trying to correlate those. But many others are not. Since we don't know when/whether GC.com will allow other benchmarks to be added to their database, is there anyone who has OCR equipment who'd like to convert these pages to electronic text and post all these marks on a web site somewhere? I'd be happy to pay the photocopying and postage costs to send a copy of the pages to someone willing to do that. Also, I just got back from four days in Yosemite, where I found some benchmarks that are in the GC.com database and some that aren't. I'll log the ones that are, and for the ones that aren't, I'll post photos and coordinates on my own web site and then put a note here on the Benchmark Hunting board to let you all know that they're available. Patty

Thanks to everyone for your responses! I'm reading through the PDA suggestions myself, and will make sure that my friend knows about your GPSr comments. If anyone else has any recommendations for the same or different products, please post them! Jeremy, I have one question about your posting: quote:Originally posted by JeremyA: Next I am thinking of getting an interface cable for my Palm so that it can communicate directly with my GPSr. The one that I have been looking at comes from Semsons & Co. and is $30. What would you be able to do with a Palm-GPSr connection that you can't already do with the Mac-GPSr connection? Thanks! Patty

If you were building a system for geocaching that would integrate well with a Mac OS X-based computer, what GPS receiver, PDA, and software would you get, and why? GPSr: I already have a Garmin GPS III+ myself, but I have a friend who's just getting into the game and is looking for GPSr recommendations. He may not choose to go quite to the top of the line at this point, but is willing to spring for a pretty high-end unit. Are there any that integrate with Macs better than others? PDA: I'm thinking of buying a PDA so that I'll always have local cache information with me whenever I'm out and about and have some spare time. The only brand sold through the Apple Store is Palm; I don't know whether that's because Palm has better Mac support than other brands, or whether Apple struck a deal with Palm to feature their products exclusively. In reading through the forums, it sounds like most any PDA will do the job. Software: Our question here divides into Mac software and PDA software. For the former, I've been looking at Mac GPS Pro, which looks very promising. For the PDA, it will have some sort of built-in web browser and text editor, right? So if I get CacheMate and MacCMConverter, I'll be in business? Miscellaneous: I know that I need an interface cable for the GPSr. The folks who make Mac GPS Pro make some, so hopefully one of those will work with my III+. Availability of the proper cable might influence my friend's decision about which GPS receiver to buy. Thanks! Patty

Ah, you're right, Stunod! The pickup reports are logged on the TB page, but the dropoffs are logged only on the cache page unless one explicitly adds a note to the TB page. So I guess my friend read my dropoff report, then came over to the TB page and posted a pickup report, thus leading me to think that the log he was referring to was supposed to be on the same page. I hope that made sense. :-) I'll remember henceforth that if there's anything I want to say about the dropoff (or the period between the pickup and dropoff), I'll have to come over to the TB page to do it. And I guess I'll have to type it right the first time, because there's no edit button on the TB logs. Thanks!

Hi! I recently had my first two experiences with travel bugs. When I put them in new caches, I logged short notes. Now I see that when someone else retrieved them, my placement logs were deleted. My own retrieval notes are still there. In looking through those and other TB pages, it looks like that's always the case: retrievals have notes, but placements don't. Why does the GC.com web site software delete the placement logs when the bug is next retrieved? In one case, a friend of mine retrieved the bug and his log refers to something I said in my log, which now makes no sense because my log is gone. Also, that TB had interim goals, and my placement log mentioned how I had helped it meet those goals while it was in my care. Now, only the photo captions give any hint about that. :-( Sorry if this is a FAQ, but I spent about half an hour searching through the forums and the TB faqs and couldn't find a previous discussion of this topic. Thanks!

Okay, thanks, I'll put a link in my profile. Here's where folks can see the photos if you're interested: http://www.wintertime.com/OH/GC/USGS.htm