Gliderguy

One thing many people may not think of ( I know I didn't until I saw something on the discovery channel about wildfires ) is an area closed for risk of fire is closed more for the user's protection than the land's protection. I saw some rather gruesome discriptions of how fast a fire can move uphill compared to a fit smokejumper. The average hiker who doesn't make a flame while walking (as in cigarette smoking or otherwise) adds about zero risk of a fire. The risk is in being caught uphill of an unknown fire that flares up suddenly and getting roasted alive. I am not a big proponent of government telling us what not to do, but these warnings don't usually go out unless the risk is serious. IE if there is a fire started below you, you are likely going to die. Some people may thrive on this kind of thing, but if they do, then Geocaching is probably too tame a sport from them and they need to take up something more extreme (maybe naked geodashing through known perverse areas with lots of poison ivy)

One thing many people may not think of ( I know I didn't until I saw something on the discovery channel about wildfires ) is an area closed for risk of fire is closed more for the user's protection than the land's protection. I saw some rather gruesome discriptions of how fast a fire can move uphill compared to a fit smokejumper. The average hiker who doesn't make a flame while walking (as in cigarette smoking or otherwise) adds about zero risk of a fire. The risk is in being caught uphill of an unknown fire that flares up suddenly and getting roasted alive. I am not a big proponent of government telling us what not to do, but these warnings don't usually go out unless the risk is serious. IE if there is a fire started below you, you are likely going to die. Some people may thrive on this kind of thing, but if they do, then Geocaching is probably too tame a sport from them and they need to take up something more extreme (maybe naked geodashing through known perverse areas with lots of poison ivy)

Your post had me rolling. Jeremy should use that as his introduction to buying a GPS. For reference, I have a Garmin

Your post had me rolling. Jeremy should use that as his introduction to buying a GPS. For reference, I have a Garmin

Get the latest version here. The programmer is adding minor upgrades almost weekly to this software: USA Photomaps When I posted this the current version was 1.95

I have owned a Garmin III, and currently own a Garmin III+ as well as the V. Over the course of the last several years, I have dropped various units during use, and have yet to damage the external antenna. If you drive much, that autorouting the V does is worth some moolah, as well as all the accessories that come standard. It comes with the City Select software (the updated 4.01 version is approaching the usefulness of Metroguide in total rural coverage) a decent car mounting bracket for the unit, a 12V power adapter, as well as the separate PC data cable. I don't know how they get all that stuff in the box. Of course it does not have the aneroid barometer/altimeter and the electronic compass, but the GPS calculated altitude is very good, and the compass rose on any GPS works as long as you are moving at a few MPH. I just bought an external Antenna from GPSGEEK on ebay for my V, and now I can get maxed out locks across the board outside, and the reception of the external antenna INDOORS is comparable to the supplied antenna OUTDOORS. (standard wood framed house, partially bricked on the front facing) The V is pretty good in general for keeping a lock under a tree canopy, but with an external antenna I am certain it blows away any unit confined to an internal antenna. Compared to a friend's yellow Etrex, in a rugged canyon situation with minimal tree cover (and minimal available sky) the V did fine as long as I was holding it with the antenna pointing toward the sky. If I let it dangle around my neck, it would lose lock, (duh, I was walking up into a box canyon, if the rocks werent blocking the signal, my body was!) The basic etrex did seem to re-aquire a lost lock faster than the V, but I have upgraded the firmware since then, that may or may not be true any longer. I think the Vista will allow external antenna hookup, but I haven't owned one and can only offer some insight to the V. Being able to display in either horizontal or vertical mode makes the Garmin number series GPS units fit about anywhere, even though they are physically bigger than the E-trex series.

I will vote for 12 since it seems to have an unofficial start and a following. On my motorcycle (with a special headset mounted in my helmet) I like using 9. I don't catch as much traffic on 8-14 cross country as on the lower 7. So if not 12 one of the other highest 7 channels (preferably other than 9, that has become my unofficial motorcycling channel)

Recently I have been leaving little aliens like the one in my avatar. They come in white, yellow and blue. Some are armed with some kind of ray-gun, some are unarmed. When some local K-Marts went belly up, they were a dollar for 6. I cleaned them out of stock and have 72 of them now.

I wish I had something specific on the Tracker to offer. The oldest magellan unit I have owned was the Blazer 12. It worked fine. If the Tracker doesn't have 12 parallel channels, you may find that it doesn't keep a lock in wooded areas very well at all. Just about any 12 channel parallel reciever (all of the units made in the last couple of years) will be better at maintaining or re-aquiring a lock under less than ideal conditions. Beyond that, if it is an older unit, it may only allow you to enter lat/longs with two decimal places in the minutes. This is equivilant to a distance precision of around 60 feet, vs 6 ft or less for the newer units that accept 3 decimal places. Many people find caches just fine with the older technology, and a few like the challenge of doing it with just map and compass, no GPS at all! I suspect the unit will work fine for you, but it will make you work a little harder than someone with a newer unit to find the same cache. You will have to look in a wider search area, possibly while losing lock moderately often. If you enjoy a challenge, it will be great. just dont let it frustrate you.

I remember this identical subject coming up in reference to PDA's and the Kyocera Smartphone. These have a serial interface and some people were blowing up serial ports occasionally when they "hot synced" their data. I suspect either no one builds serial ports like they used to (possible, getting close to being a useless technology) or there is something to the whole issue, probably static related.

Another thing about glide ratio if it is getting its info for altitude from the barometric sensor, and you are trying to get a glide ratio in a car going over a hill: Some automobiles develop a slight suction in the passenger compartment that increases with speed. This is intentional as it uses the pressure change to move fresh air through the passenger compartment. If you accelerate down a hill you may negate the pressure rate change from decending. The opposite is also true, if you lose speed going uphill you may negate the pressure change from ascending. I discovered this one day when I had a variometer (a sensitive rate of climb insturment) inside a vehicle testing it out over some hills. Acceleration could peg the thing in climb mode, and hard braking would peg it to more than 1000fpm down. Using a GPS in the mountains, the steepest hill I could climb and maintain highway speeds only showed about 350 fpm up. This in a pickup truck with a large V-8 engine. Constant speed over the hills will possibly make a difference.

40 Paces is WAY too much picante sauce to go through to get to one cache. "Left numerous empty salsa jars, took bulk pack of antacids..."

40 Paces is WAY too much picante sauce to go through to get to one cache. "Left numerous empty salsa jars, took bulk pack of antacids..."

I don't see any problem with this cache. However, If it were me, I would make it a multi with the real cache at the park you propose for its permanent location, and only coords available at the fair (or maybe a pamplet to go with the coords) If you are concerned about excessive traffic at the park if hundreds of people decide to seek your cache, make it a little more complicated with an offset or something. What would be really cool is if you could have one of those free viewable 3-D images made up with the lat/longs of the cache. You know the kind I am talking about, the images that look like white noise dots until you cross (or actually un-cross) your eyes just right. I used to have some software that would let you create your own image...

I can't remember the Magellian GPS 2000, so I would wager it is one of the old multiplexing style recievers with 8 channels or less. Modern 12 channel parallel units do a MUCH better job of keeping and holding a lock than the older style multiplexing units. I think you would find that even the cheapest E-trex would run circles around an older style unit that doesn't do 12 channels. As long as you have some sky available, I would say maybe 20% of entire hemisphere of the sky visible, you will probably (probably, as in statistically likely-there will be some times you can't get a lock. No GPSr can aquire a lock unless it can see three satellites) be able to see three birds. We don't have any birds going over the north pole right now so if your only visible sky is low on the horizon to the north you probably won't get a lock. I can get Sat locks on commercial airliners in flight. (with a Garmin V but other people have done it also with other brands/models) , so long as I sit on the south side of the plane. I can't imagine being in a city as a more difficult situation than trying to lock through those tiny airliner porthole windows...

Would that be trampling while holding a Trimble? Ugh. Now I think it might be spelled trampeling. I think I will go lay down a while. Seriously though, I agree, we should avoid damage to habitat.

Would that be trampling while holding a Trimble? Ugh. Now I think it might be spelled trampeling. I think I will go lay down a while. Seriously though, I agree, we should avoid damage to habitat.

I have two separate thoughts on this. If Geocaching is the only real use you have for a GPS, you could go bargain style or go for all you can afford. If you go bargain style (basic yellow Etrex, Magellian 315...) you won't be out much if you give up the hobby. If you do really stick with the hobby, and later upgrade your GPS to a top of the line unit later, then your basic unit can become your "loaner" to hook other people on the sport. This route makes sense for someone who could afford two GPS units, or is really on a budget. If you go whole hog up front (Meridian platinum, Garmin GPS V ect.), there is the risk that you may tire of Geocaching, but the more feature packed units (such as those with mapping and autorouting) are more useful in a car. A more complex unit has a somewhat steeper learning curve, but for anyone technically minded enough to use the internet and a PC, even a top shelf unit wouldn't be too bad. This seems the way to go for someone who can afford more than a base unit, but who doesn't have enough expendable cash to justify eventually owning two GPS recievers.

That other user was probably me. I think the comment was in the original post I made announcing the availability of firmware 2.07 I have noticed that I can get between 6-8 ft "accuracy" once all satellites have differential corrections applied.. I think though, that once you get across the board differential corrections, if you turn WAAS off, you will see the exact same accuracy number still. (or at least I did this once or twice. maybe the accuracy figure doesnt degrade until the WAAS corrections data is a few minutes out of date...)

I have had no problems, However, I am not a "power user" I have saved waypoints, done autorouting, loaded and saved waypoints/tracks to mapsource, and used the GPS on an airplane with good results since the upgrade. On road and off road goto's seemed to work fine. I sometimes still have trouble with the unit getting into an "offroute-recalculating" loop, but I have noticed this only happens when the Mapsource maps don't agree well with the actual roads (a few hundered feet off, enough that the unit keeps thinking it is on a side road rather than the main highway.) You will have to ask someone else if the unit gives strange error messages when flying inverted in a 6 G maneuver at 450kts over the north pole on the summer solstice. (but only in a lavendar, mauve, and heliotrope colored aircraft) I did notice that they seemed to have tweaked the "accuracy" figure when using WAAS. Before it always equalled the non-WAAS value after it settled down for a minute or two. Now (with good satellite geometry and signal) it consistently gives better numbers than non-WAAS . I see WAAS "accuracy" values of 7 and 8 feet all the time now, and when turning WAAS off, they jump to 12-15 feet.

I have had no problems, However, I am not a "power user" I have saved waypoints, done autorouting, loaded and saved waypoints/tracks to mapsource, and used the GPS on an airplane with good results since the upgrade. On road and off road goto's seemed to work fine. I sometimes still have trouble with the unit getting into an "offroute-recalculating" loop, but I have noticed this only happens when the Mapsource maps don't agree well with the actual roads (a few hundered feet off, enough that the unit keeps thinking it is on a side road rather than the main highway.) You will have to ask someone else if the unit gives strange error messages when flying inverted in a 6 G maneuver at 450kts over the north pole on the summer solstice. (but only in a lavendar, mauve, and heliotrope colored aircraft) I did notice that they seemed to have tweaked the "accuracy" figure when using WAAS. Before it always equalled the non-WAAS value after it settled down for a minute or two. Now (with good satellite geometry and signal) it consistently gives better numbers than non-WAAS . I see WAAS "accuracy" values of 7 and 8 feet all the time now, and when turning WAAS off, they jump to 12-15 feet.

The features according to Garmin: Added MILS angle support to compass displays. Added "Vertical Speed" units selection field to the "Units" setup tab page. Corrected problem sorting and selecting the nearest user waypoint. Improved the "Turn Review" page map processing to update the next turn quicker when turns are close together. Changed distance displays where appropriate to never show fractional parts of feet or meters. Corrected problem panning the map in portrait mode after route calculation. Corrected problem that caused repeated or looping off route recalculations. Made corrections to European language translations. Garmin GPS V Firmware 2.07

I contacted Kyocera first before taking up the issue with Sprint. They told me that the internal workings of the Smartphones they sold to Sprint were identical to those sold to other wireless companies. They told me they couldn't unlock the phone either.

I explored one option of an Ebayer who had "instructions for unlocking a sprint phone" His instructions basically involved duping Sprint into giving you the unlock code by pretending to be the new owner of the phone (and an inept one at that, who can't seem to get the basic unlock code to work, so they have to resort to the master code) I didn't feel to good about trying it, but my wife talked one of her technically minded friends to give it a try on my wife's (supposedly) disconnectd phone. It didn't work because Sprint had yet to close out the account with my wife more than a month after we requested them to be closed out and service cancelled. (oh, yea, that was something else that reduced my opinion of them... I had almost forgotten ) Of course, YMMV.

I explored one option of an Ebayer who had "instructions for unlocking a sprint phone" His instructions basically involved duping Sprint into giving you the unlock code by pretending to be the new owner of the phone (and an inept one at that, who can't seem to get the basic unlock code to work, so they have to resort to the master code) I didn't feel to good about trying it, but my wife talked one of her technically minded friends to give it a try on my wife's (supposedly) disconnectd phone. It didn't work because Sprint had yet to close out the account with my wife more than a month after we requested them to be closed out and service cancelled. (oh, yea, that was something else that reduced my opinion of them... I had almost forgotten ) Of course, YMMV.