The Forester

Good post, AgentMancuso. Unfortunately the chumps in the Leith Numptorium were quite incompetent in draughting the legislation and they've opened up a dreadful can of worms which has been immensely lucrative for the scumbags of the legal trade. There have been a few Court cases already, including two which produced quite perverse results. The nouveau riche are the very worst landowners. A dreadful example is the Stagecoach squillionairess Madam Anne Souter-Gloag. She exploited the new legislation to erect a completely impassable "security" fence. The Sheriff Court upheld her newly created right to do that. At the opposite end of the landowner spectrum is Graham Tuley. He's the inventor of the eponymous plastic tube tree-shelter. He and his wife created a wonderful piece of woodland and built three separate path networks through their woodland to accommodate walkers; cyclists; and horseriders. To preserve the integrity of the walking and cycling paths he limited horse access to those paths. A commercial horseyculture place next door complained to the Cooncil that their horses weren't being given free access to tear up one of the public footpaths and the Court upheld the complaint. Completely nuts! Fortunately the Court ruling was overturned on Appeal, but the whole thing cost Mr & Mrs Tuley a bloody huge number of tens of thousands of Pounds. My problem at Forester Towers is that I want to avoid getting into any such bunfight, but I also want to create a publically accessible footpath while also protecting my domestic privacy. The new legislation has made it more difficult, not less, for me to create such a delightful pathway for people to enjoy. A few years ago I created a puzzle/multi cache which involved people identifying the species of six trees on the 17 acres of Forester Towers to find the decimal digits of Minutes of Latitude and Longitude of the ammo can cachebox. The cache fell foul of some excrutiatingly tedious nitpicking by the GC.com bureaucrats, so it was never published, but it exists for private cachers (not Geocachers though). While I was creating that cache trail I was advised by a tame lawyer that I was exposing myself to all kinds of legal horrors by publishing the details and route of that cachetrail, as a result of the two new land access laws which were passed in '03. I think they call it the Law of Unintended Consequences.

I'm currently creating a 250 metre long path in a piece of woodland which I planted at Forester Towers in 1993. I want to create an enjoyable pathway, but one of several problems I have is that the the toe of the L-shaped woodland is very close to the house. I've been looking very carefully at what I can and cannot do to encourage people to enjoy the woodlands while protecting my personal privacy. For that reason Ive been studying, very carefully, the land access laws of Scotland. Here's something which I found in Section 14 of The Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003: Prohibition signs, obstructions, dangerous impediments etc. (1) The owner of land in respect of which access rights are exercisable shall not, for the purpose or for the main purpose of preventing or deterring any person entitled to exercise these rights from doing so - (a) put up any sign or notice; ( B ) put up any fence or wall, or plant, grow or permit to grow any hedge, tree or other vegetation; ( c) position or leave at large any animal; (d) carry out any agricultural or other operation on the land; or (e) take, or fail to take, any other action. I'm not a lawyer and I don't play one in the movies, but my interpretation of that clause of Scots Law is that the placement of an electric fence across any path, whether a Right of Way or not, is illegal and is actionable. Of course this post only applies to people who live in the free world.

Five weeks. Only two finders in the following calendar year. I really don't think that the number of visits to a cache, or the frequency between those finds, is a good indicator of the quality or worthwhileness of a cache. That cache, which took five weeks to attract a single finder, is still going strong six years later and has recently been complimented as being one of the best in the country.

And please don't make it about fitba' or telly stuff!

Ho hum. I'm afraid I have to do the "national" thing and point out that the relevant laws and procedures are very different in different components of the UK. In the isle of Man they have their thing. In Scotland we have laws and procedures which are completely different in their style and orign from the Anglo version. In fact, I seem to remember reading about one or two occasions when we even came to blows with eachother over the matter.

Howdy, neighbour. I'm on the Countryside Access Steering Committee of my nearest Community Council and I too am a bit gobby on the matter. Despite our wonderful Countryside Access (Scotland) Act, we don't have much Scots Law on the subject of electric fencing. I know it's feeble, but the only legal thing you can do is to complain to the Council's Countryside Access Officer and perhaps copy your correspondence to the Scottish Rights Of Way Society. Of course, I could tell you how to earth an electric fence ....

Many thanks for the heads-up, BurtsBodgers. My telescope takes 8 x AAs at a time, so I need at least 24 rechargables to assure a good night's work. The lower capacity isn't much of a hardship in that application as by the time the batteries are run down it's time to go inside to warm up and have a slurp of hot soup.

60° actually. That's why it's called a sextant. If you haven't got a dish of mercury to hand (very heavy stuff to lug around), just paint the inside of a bucket matt black and fill it with water. It's a trick I teach in my Advanced Land Navigation Course. You can also use the same trick with a theodolite, which is one or two orders of magnitude more precise than a sextant, but then you are limited to stars which are quite low above the horizon because of the time lag in the two-part measurement. I use the trick with a theodolite rather than a sextant as it's easier to demo if I'm teaching a group of four students instead of just one. A noon sight for Latitude us next to useless at the equator and is impossible using the HSE's favourite method above Polaris is equally useless as it would be on the horizon hiding behind a tree or an ant hill.

I'll accept that (the spelling of the answer, not the bar order). The Russians actually called their SatNav system Tsikada. It worked by transmitting a constant tone which rose and faded as it passed your location like the sound of a passing train. Knowing its orbit and by timing the exact time that the tone's frequency nulled (known as the Doppler effect) you could calculate a line of position along which you were situated. Match several of those satellite pass measurements and you had your co-ordinates on the ground. It worked quite well, but was as cumbersome as the American equivalent and lacked the sophistication of the US Imperial globe-spanning tracking network to tweak the orbital parameters. They're still up there and they're still doing useful work, but unlike their American counterparts they're now integrated into the worldwide SARSAT (search and rescue satellite) system for the saving of human life at sea.

I hope you'd handle it better than the Indian Special Forces did last year in Mumbai.

I think the rock/leopard/bar explanation is the best fit. The Geoidal Height, ie the difference between the geoid and the spheroid at that location, is +17.01m for WGS84 (the one we use) and -95.05m for the Clarke 1880 spheroid which is quiet certainly the one which was used for the calculation of the location of this survey monument. That wouldn't account for the 298m error shown by the GPSr in the picture. The height at that location is 945m above the geoid, but we don't know what orthometric height the traverse from Cape Town (or wherever) had produced. I would doubt very much that it was out by as much as 200 metres of height, even that far into the hinterland. Measuring Latitude astro-geodetically is a piece o' pish with a theodolite. Digging the foundations for a tourist monument, with rocky ground and leopards and dusky bar-flies who urgently crave your indulgence in certain "Ugandan discussions" while you blow the froth off an ice-cold pint of Tusker, is a quite different matter.

I doubt that the locals in the pub in my local village would be able to answer any question that isn't about football or tv soap-operas. They're type of people who say "Ooohh!" when ever they hear someone pronounce a trisyllabic word. The denizens of another pub three or four villages away, however, easily beat the kids on University Challenge every time. I suspect that even in the dumbest pub you'd find someone who could guess the name of a very loud insect though.

That's a ding to Sleepynow01 for getting the right location; and also a Mention in Despatches to HH for getting the purpose of the test pattern right. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly NIMA, formerly DMA) uses these test patterns, which are located all around the world, to calibrate their spysat imagery's orthorectification and georeferencing. The cover story of them being motorcycle training arenas is slightly true as the test pattern was given to the MSF by the then DMA, but the cover story breaks down when you look at the ratio of military and NSA bases to civilian locations where these things are so carefully set out. I like the idea of the Little League and Major League Rounders pitches being smiley faces, but I think that Dan Brown would insist that they're Masonic symbols and that the missing golfball, the third from the left, has been teed off and is now bunkered under the crypt of Roslin Chapel. To get some idea of how much better the NSA spysat imagery resolution is than our Google Earth stuff take a look at the fine detail which is actually painted on the ground. We think we're lucky if we can get 25cm resolution from our accessible imagery, and that's aerial stuff taken from a piston twin flying at 5,000' agl. The grownups, with their U2s and satellites, are looking at 10cm resolution! Edited to add the template of what the test pattern is actually comprised of:

If you sum the total IQs in that pub, do you reach triple digits?

Time for an easypeasy clue: Named after a noisy insect.

A message to aliens is getting a bit political for the prefects around here, so we'll leave that out. Quite right about the Little League and Major League Rounders pitches though.

In Latitude, my money's on you, Roger. In Longitude, my money would be on the GPS getting it wrong by a lot more than a hundred metres at that Latitude.

With a provisional self-ding, subject to confirmation, here's one that is quite apt for the theme of the game: To give some context to the closeup image, here's a zoomed out piccie too: Usual qualifier required to keep the bureaucrats quiet, but a more interesting question is: What are those strange shapes used for?

Not sure of the protocol here. I'm confident that the cache is the one I've stated and that's been confirmed by the cache's creator, so is a self-ding legit?

I recognise that terrain! Britain's second highest mountain and vastly more interesting than the hump-backed lump Ben Nevis. http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...d8-af2628179c76.

What a dreadful way to teach kids about Navigation! A compass is a great tool, but without a map of some sort, it is likely to lead you entirely the wrong way in many situations. This toy appears to dumb down Navigation to blindly following a pointer needle. That's a really really bad way to navigate.

There are spacecraft which can measure their own co-ordinates by measuring angles between stars, but this satellite system wasn't/isn't one of them. The Shuttle Orbiter uses that optical system, as do Trident misssiles and other ICBMs. The satellite system in this question is still in use, albeit using its priniciple of operation in reverse. It is part of the Search and Rescue satellite system. Instead of indicating position of receivers on the ground, it now measures the position of transmitters on the ground, specifically emergency locator beacons such as are fitted to trans-oceanic aircraft and ships. Its former counterpart, USN Transit, is also still in use, but not for direct position fixing. Its signals are used to measure ionospheric effects and those measurements are used to tweak GPS data. Edited to delete two grocer's apostrophes which had smuggled themselves in.

For viewers in Scotland, I would slightly modify by saying that ra Cooncil person you need to contact is the Countryside Access Officer.

So, Londoners don't need a GPSr, just ask your nearest rat where the nearest cache is. He's bound to know!

The Russian equivalent of NavStar GPS is Glonass. What was the name of Russian equivalent of the now obsolete US Navy Transit satnav system? And for a bonus point, describe its operating principle. How did the thing work? Usual rules: no Googling etc.