SSO JOAT
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Posts posted by SSO JOAT
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Great! Rather than trying to reel a potential geocacher back in after a perceived bad start, we should alienate them further by telling them to go away.
As an expert in profiling people, it is quite clear that the OP hasn't the ability or drive to be a geocacher. I gave him the best advice for his situation.
If enough people get frustrated and leave, or we do what you just did and alienate new members to the point that they don't become new members, guess what happens to your ability to go geocaching.
My ability to geocache is not affected at all by other people's frustration with using the internet. Further, I'd very much prefer that dumb people do NOT become geocachers. They are the reason for everything from spoiled and missing caches to TB abductions. Only folks with a true interest in excelling at this sport should play.
Not a sport. No competition. No winner.I get so tired of this BS anti-sport rebuttal. Open your dictionary. Look up "sport". It's under the "S" section, which is right after "R" and just before "T". Read it. There is NO requirement for a sport to be a competition or have a winner. Now go look up "game". A game requires competition and a winner. You guys keep confusing the two words. Geocaching is NOT a game, but it is a sport. There are games within geocaching, such as FTF and most of the other stuff you'll find on your statistics tab (furthest, fastest, mostest, etc). But the overall activity is an "outdoor sport". Some people do it as a hobby, and some of us are more serious about it than that. Your level of involvement in a particular sport (hiking, biking, jogging, caving, climbing, boating, geocaching, etc) is up to you.
p.s. Lighten up a bit. Sarcasm is my preferred window dressing on internet forums.
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Build your own fake rock. Start with a waterproof container and mold your own rock around it. One of my favs was one of the large round ziploc screw-top containers that had a waterproof plaster rock molded around it leaving just the opening of the container exposed on the bottom of the rock. The guy embedded real pea gravel into the outside of the plaster. When set on a rocky hillside, it simply disappeared into the terrain. Took me several visits to the site and hours of searching before I found that cache. And it turned out that the coordinates were right on. In the end, I only found it when I tripped over this large rock and it fell over, exposing the lid to the cache contained inside. I was amazed at how realistic this rock was. And judging by the size, you'd think it was at least 50-pound rock, but with the lightweight plaster it was less than 10. I've wanted to do something similar with an ammo can. Yet another project on my to-do list.
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Maybe there could be a second number provided, the ratio of favorites/finds.
We're playing with this idea too - at least as an alternate method for sorting/scoring. The data is there which is the important part.
The ratio will work better once more people rate their favorites, though even now it can be useful.
Just adding a column to the cache search page that shows the number of found it logs would solve this quick and easy. Put it right next to the blue ribbon column and you have your "ratio" right there in front of you.
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Maybe you're just expecting it to update too quickly. The site has always been slow to update stats.
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I am a Smartphone user... <blah blah blah>
The Geocaching concept should be simple and straight forward... <blah blah blah>
This is a sport played with a GPS and it's not supposed to be "easy". Clearly, you're not cut out for it. Recommend you immediately return to playing video games on the couch. Problem solved. G'day.
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Depending on ease of access and the proximity of the cache to your home, there is also the option to dry out the log and return it to the cache. I've done this several times. Take the wet log and leave a temp log in the cache. Write in your online log that you swapped logs and will return the original to the cache shortly. Once back at the house, fan out the wet log and let it dry for a few days. After the log is dry, drop it back at the cache on my next trip by. It seems that most CO's completely ignore this, just like they ignored the previous half-dozen logs stating the that logbook was wet. But a few of the CO's are very appreciative of the effort. I've never had a CO get upset for doing maintenance on their cache.
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This system would be perfect if they also included 1 "gong" award per hundred finds that you can assign to your least favorite cache. The caveat being that the issuer's name is associated with the "gong" just like the blue ribbons and you have to write a "why I don't like it" log that goes with the "gong" award.
Tis great that this "favorites" system is not anonymous.
Beware of some abuse of the system. Sock puppet and CO logging (if the CO logs thier own cache as a find, can they also assign their own cache as a favorite?) and "good ol boy" clubs where friends favorite each other's caches in backscratch fashion.
It's not as good as the "awesomeness" concept that Garmin put forth, but it is a step forward.
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Just be really careful about the stealth thingie. It would really suck to have the Bomb-squad arrive and blow up your new car right after you hid it.
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Shuttle the car to your local Wal-Mart and park it next to a lamp post at the end of the lot. Under the lamp post, place your magnetic hide-a-key cache with the key to the car and a note saying happy b-day blah, blah, blah, now turn around and try out your present...
Do this with great stealth, as you certainly don't want someone to see you hide the key to the car at the same time you parked it, in fact I'd go so far as to place the hide-a-key the day prior to parking the car there, so that the 2 actions can't be seen happening together.
So, make that the final stage. Do whatever you want with the first, but I'd suggest writing up a fake cache listing with the coordinates and printing this out. Place it inside a b-day card or wrap it up inside a box... better yet, an ammo can.
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Perhaps, judging only by your chosen profile pic, that you are watching too much TV? Get out of the house. You'll like it.
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I'd recommend you check out some of our work up in the Greatland...
http://www.geocachealaska.org/education.htm
Prolly get some very good ideas from here. Good luck.
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Re the clothing stuff... forget anything cotton, especially blue jeans!!! Polarfleece is by far the best thing you can put against your skin. Wool is fine for socks, but not much else (plus it is far too expensive). A set of light polarfleece base layer with a wind-block polarfleece outer and you're all set.
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Being a rocket scientist and all, I'm curious about the recovery parachute deployment. Does the chute get deployed at the balloon bursting point, or do you have altimeter electronics to deploy the chute at low altitude on return? With rockets, you can get very accurate LZ prediction when you allow a streamer free fall from apogee and have an altimeter deploy a chute at 500-1000 feet AGL to slow the decent down enough to avoid impact damage.
Hope your venture goes perfectly!
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A clock error in the GPSr of just one microsecond (0.000001) gives you a ground error of nearly 1,000 feet. When talking about speed of light calculations, nanosecond accuracy is needed. The clock accuracy in the GPSr is critical to the accuracy of the numbers you see on the screen. Buy a cheap, single chip GPSr (such as they put in many cell phones) and you're going to have less accuracy than you would with a more expensive "high-sensitivity" Garmin. Fact.
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As for accuracy as you buy more expensive units. Garmin rates the eTrex H at 10 meter accuracy which is the same accuracy quoted for the high end Oregons. Given the statement that a more expensive unit has better clocks and receivers I would think that the accuracy quoted would be better for a 550 than the basic eTrex.
All of the "high sensitivity" units feature the same clock and processor. The clocking comparison is better made by comparing any of the Garmin "H" units to an older "non-H" unit or to say the GPS chip installed in a cell phone.
The clock is quite important to end accuracy. To say it is "miniscule" means you haven't looked at the level of fractional math going on to calculate your position. Time differences that are best stated as negative powers of 10 are used to figure out your location. The GPS "warm up" period is when the current orbit data is downloaded and the GPSr internal clock is perfectly synchronized to the satellite clocks. Yes, the satellite clocks must be extremely accurate so the sat can calculate it's own position based on ground tracking stations. But the GPSr clock must be accurate in order to figure out it's own location. The satellite don't figure out where you are, they just tell your GPSr where they are. It is up to the GPSr to do its own math and calculate its own position based on the distance to these other sats. Without a perfect clock in the GPSr, such calculations are going to be inaccurate.
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The maps are not very accurate. While the city level detail of most Google mapping is pretty close, the further you get away from the city, the less time they spend trying to match up sat photos exactly with the true coordinate grids.
For example, come up to Alaska and you'll find that once you get away from the city of Anchorage and into the wilderness, the Google satellite maps can be off by hundreds of feet plus they don't offer close up detail for areas away from the cities. Combined, there is no way to find these rural and wilderness caches without a GPSr.
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I have two notebooks full of puzzle cache ideas (no, I won't share any of them). As they come to me, I write them down. Later, I go back and look over these raw ideas looking for something promising to refine further. Some of these eventually make it into production phase and get published. Building a puzzle cache is a work of art and a lot of work. Try scanning over puzzle caches well outside of your geographic area for general ideas, but make your puzzle caches your own.
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There is more to the GPS than just the "reception". Yes, the radio receiver gets better as you go up in price model. Yes, a better antenna gives you better reception. Beyond that, the most important aspect of a GPS is how accurate the internal clock is. A lower quality clock gives less accurate results. A higher quality clock gives more accurate results. The manufacturers are nice enough to not give the consumer any information about the clocks they use. But, if you get a $99 off-brand GPS, the quality of the electronic components, including the clock, is going to suffer compared to a high quality name brand unit in the $400-500 range. And those don't hold a candle to a $3000 surveyor model.
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Pull full PQ for the region you're hunting in, then use GSAK filters to not only pick out those with listed TBs, but you can do a lot of fancy date & log filtering to get rid of the caches that likely do not have a trackable in them. The power of GSAK is only limited by your imagination when it comes to these kinds of searches.
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This will prolly help, too.
Visit this site and download the PDF of my puzzle solving presentation listed under the September educational event materials. http://www.geocachealaska.org/education.html
And visit this archived event cache listing http://coord.info/GC2CKND
(it has the solution for the puzzle in the PDF file above)
That will give you a couple ideas and the resources links near the end will give you a bunch more places to read up on puzzle solving.
Search for some lower difficulty rated puzzle caches and just start reading through them until you find types you can solve. Some puzzle are extremely difficult and some are very simple. You've got to pick and choose which to spend your time on.
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Maintenance Plan? What do they want you to do, fill out a GS-2404 in triplicate and submit a notarized copy through the magistrate? Seriously. A "maintenance plan" is nothing more than saying, "I'll be visiting the cache site periodically and if someone reports maintenance is needed, I'll return at the next available opportunity and take care of it. Thanks for asking." You've already shot yourself in the foot with the "visit every couple years" thingie. TMI!
Here's a cache maintenance plan in action... guy landed his private plane in an extremely remote part of Alaska, tossed a plastic tupperware container out the door, and flew away. It's been unfound for over 4 years. The owner hasn't logged in for over 2.5 years. I seriously doubt that the cache is still in one piece (plastic box in an area infested with bears and squirrels in the summer and buried under 40+ feet of snow in the winter). What do you suppose the "maintenance plan" was for this one? http://coord.info/GCXTE7
Know nothing about the location (or even what part of the planet we're talking about), but if this area is as kewl as it sounds, I wouldn't limit your excursion to a single cache. Give some more appeal to the area and drop a whole series of caches out there working from the outer island up to the inner islands. Heck, I would personally make a multi-cache that has the coordinates hidden on the island that leads you back to an easier cache way back on the mainland or something like that. None of them are going to get many visits, but if you're going out there, you might as well give anyone who goes through the trouble to follow you a fun time and a bunch of smilies for the effort. IMHO
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Winter is the best. With all the leaves, bears, and bugs gone, those off the beaten path caches are much easier to get to in the early winter. In mid-winter, all those previously mentioned island caches are way to go. In late winter, the extremely remote caches deep in the mountains are easy to drive snowmachines to for those of us who are not into a 20-mile walk during the heat of summer.
Oh yeah, and winter is also the best time to curl up in front of the fire and work on all those Puzzle Caches!!!
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As long as it says Garmin on the front it will be the right GPS.
Since you're looking for multiple units, I'd stick to the eTrex series for best price.
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in General geocaching topics
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They most certainly do. Both of these games are all about "competition" (against the machine, so to speak) and trying to "win".