kbootb

I liked the idea of police tape I also quite liked the idea of a 'local' newspaper but left well out of its normal area. One of the things I like about holiday is reading the local paper, watching the local news. Being in London the local news is often a repeat of the national stuff. But seashells? What is that about. And these are nothing special, just average whelks etc. I have seen them in about 3 caches recently, no mention of who left them in the log.

If it was in a 'holiday' area i.e. we felt like staying there maybe, other wise, probably not. Still too many caches to do and still too rubbish at finding them.

I wrote an article on just this subject for geocaching today. It was published there but I'm danged if I can find it there now. On 1st September this year: 5757 registered cachers. 89 had placed caches but never found one! Only counting the 'finders' 1184 people have found a cache at some time but have not been active in the last three months. that leaves 4484 'active cachers. I looked in more detail. 1399 people have found only one cache. Of these 1148 did not find another in the next three months. Over 80% drop out 620 people have found 2 caches. 516 of these have not been active in last 3 months. I went through all the stats for this and found that if you look cumulatively at people that have found 1 - 10 caches this accounts for 70% of all cachers and of that 70% only 20% are 'active'. There is a huge drop out rate until you have hit 10, once over the 10 you appear to be hooked.

Very impressed. Congratulations

My favourite cache (locationwise) in London was GCH9HP. And I didn't even find it. Me too, and I still haven't found it. However, don't even think about driving to that one. Are you looking for caches that you can drive to and grab, or are you lookinng for spending a day on pulic transport in central London? Also, what are your feelings on virtual/micro/regular?

All is working today. All is right in my little world. Topic closed....until next time

Thanks for the links but a firewall failing would not remove their entry from a UK DNS. The address was unresolvable for at least 4 hours. I have no idea if their entry went from US DNS. Somewhere up the chain their domain name had been damaged or removed and needed to be re-propogated. A fairly major problem. A firewall failing would still allow the name to be resolved but access to the server would fail. Any way, all is back and the hunt for the elusive plastic box can continue.

Is it just me or has geocaching.com and the forum site been dead today? I hate to get technical, but the domain was actually missing from every UK DNS server I could find today, effectively they did not even exist. More than just the server playing up. I have to say, I have no idea who to tell when I see the server is dying.

Went for a walk today (non-caching ) and saw about 10 likely locations. Lucky I was too lazy to place them wasn't it?

I've just had a row with my ISP as they made a change to one of the services that affected me. I felt that they had not informed me, they pointed out that the 'announcement' was on the home web page. I don't think I have ever looked at this page since day 1. (The announcement wasn't there anyway, it was a small item on a page linked from the home page, so I claim I won that one) ANYWAY. I then realised, since I have GSAK working well, and set up the forums in the favourites etc, I haven't visited the homepage at geocaching.com for weeks. There could be an important annoucment there and I would never know. How often do you actually read the home page of any of the GC sites?

Where in London will you be staying? How will you be travelling around? Do we have to keep you near bus routes, train stations etc or will you have a car? I live at the very north of London, I prefer the caches in the forests and fields rather than the more urban ones. My guess would be that you are using public transport and would prefer the caches in the city. But if you had a car and would like to get to the more countryside type at the edge I could give you a list of nice ones near me.

Wow. Thanks guys for the OS info. The combined knowledge of this forum is astounding.

I remember doing some work on the maths of this about 20 years ago, so very distant memories. Using the deg min or even better deg.decdeg makes it easier to calculate distances between points. There is a direct relationship between metres on the ground and degs lat/lon covered. I have no idea what the maths behind OS grid is. Does one unit specify a particular distance. If given two positions on the grid, is there a formula that you could use to calculate straight line (or great circle) distance between them. Not that I am advocating for the lat/lon solution on the basis that I can use the maths behind it when in the field, just that I know there is maths behind it and have no idea about the logic behind OS

Perfectly normal. Try this, go to a place, mark the waypoint. Come back every now and then over the next few days, stand in exactly the same spot and see how far it says to the waypoint you recently captured. Even standing still at the place you will see the distance vary over a period of about 10 minutes. My etrex has a magnetic compass so even when stationary it will point towards the waypoint. Interesting to see it dance around. Any buildings, hills in the area will reflect some of the signal and add to the 'noise' no matter how many sats the unit is reporting as seeing. How gps works The above link will take you to a very readable tutorial on how gps works and will give a clue to its limitations. I am in awe of the people that worked all this out.

Has anyone actually had cause or know definitavely (?sp) of someone who has given GPS co-ords on a 999 call. Questions that come to mind, would the operator recognise them? What format e.g. deg min.dec min or deg min sec would they use? Also would the map datum be significant? Part of the reason I ask this is that in the holidays we drove around France and Italy. Each campsite we pre-booked sent us a leaflet with a GPS co-ordinate as part of the details. SOunds brilliant. They were in deg min sec, but not a problem. However, none of the co-ordinates were better than 4 miles accurate, and the worst was 20 miles out. Tried fiddling around with the datum but couldn't really make much difference. I thought that perhaps the co-ords had been taken in deg min.decimal minutes and perhaps the proofreader or who typed them up had thought 'coords are in deg min sec' and just stuck in separaters without actual doing any maths, but this didn't seem to work either. So... if this were an emergency situation the GPS co-ords would have bee useless. However, caching co-ords from the geocaching.com website were spot on.

Looks like fun. Also looks like I live pretty much on the try line, I think the Southern try line is a wide one to defend.

I'm up for it. I have experience with ipaq/gpxsonar gsak, autoroute, garmin etrex, and can get access to Tom Tom if required. Part of my job is writing guides/manuals etc for novice teachers so I've got experience in what makes a guide useable.

What file type are they? If BMP then load them into a paint packag and save as JPG. This will compress them without changing image size and with little loss of quality. Also make sure not to save over the original image. Nice to keep the high quality one ontouched.

"Didn't you mark the car on that thing?" "Wait a minute, it's turned itself off again"

Ta for that, I was just banging e-mails to deego and teasel. But I hoped someone who knows would have a more direct route to them. Best of luck to the guys. I have spent all day clearing trojans from a network. I'm fed up with the ***********. If I ever get my hands on one of them********

Looks like GCUK has been hacked and hijacked. Someone needs to know about this...

Hacked and hijacked by the look of it. Some one who knows who to contact had better tell them quick. Teasel, Deego, any body ?

Yes it cuts both ways. If we say it will benefit them by increasing the number of visitors by 1 a week on average it looks pathetic. If we say it will really boost their numbers then they get all twitchy about damage etc. I have a watch set on many of the local caches I have found. 'Countryside' on edge of London. Most get about 3 hits a month. Some have had only 1 in the last 3 months, while another in a similar location about a mile away had 6 hits last month. There seems to be a cut off point around here, 30 or so from local people and then it really slows down until some one makes a day of it and does a sweep of the area.

Just to be really clear. The GSAK/GPXsonar or Cachemate solution doesn't really help with the mapping/routeplanning part. These allow you to carry around cache descriptions and recent logs without paper. People either go for the GCUK/streetmap route, or the PDA enthusiasts go for Memory Map or Fugawi which are OS based maps that allow you to import waypoints and draw routes. I haven't got to this yet. I have a SatNav solution on my PDA for driving, but it does not allow me to put in points using co-ordinates so it's a bit of hard labour to put them in manually but this works well for getting the driving bit right, but relatively expensive. I have also found an old 2001 copy of autoroute I forgot I had. I can import waypoints from GSAK into that and then route plan, but this again is not paperless but it helps me with getting an overview of the area and seeing a sensible order to tackle them.

Thanks for that, not too difficult. Increases the chance of me getting MM