piper28

For the record, I've never had the bean bag mount fall off my dash in either of my cars. And I'm not necessarily the smoothest driver around, I tend to corner a little fast . The Jeep there's kinda a depression in the dash that it sits in, which helps, and even off-road I've never had a problem. The passat has a smooth curved dash, and even on that it's never slid around. I'm not denying it could happen, just noting that in general it stays put pretty well.

Personally I'd do something like this if I thought it would take me somewhere interesting. I actually enjoy driving (although gas prices these days suck). Sadly, I've found around here all our roads are straight and boring.

Ah, I can see it now, dial 911 "We're sorry, all operators are currently out geocaching. If you have an emergency, leave a note at the nearest cache and we'll get right on it." (And for the humour impaired, I'm trying (badly) to be funny, not implying that it would actually happen.)

I think the real answer to this question that comes up a fair amount can only be answered one way. I strongly suggest finding a store that sells both, and hold them in your hand. While the extra memory of the 76CS would have been nice, I just found the 60cs felt so much more comfortable in the hand, and the button location fit how I hold it. Others have found they prefer the way the 76 series fits in their hand. So far for me I've found that the lesser memory on the 60 hasn't posed a problem, and that includes a couple of long trips I've taken. But I strongly believe that nobody should make this decision without holding the two respective units in hand, because I honestly believe that's the biggest difference between them, and can be a make or break issue. (For the record, back when I bought my gps, I had been leaning towards the 76cs because of the memory, but after holding them in the store, I couldn't picture carrying the 76cs around, and the 60cs was a perfect fit for my hand. My wife was even more adament about it. And I haven't once regretted that decision.)

Thanks folks, now that I have a better idea I'll have to go back and take another look. As I recall, the description said it was only supposed to be about a foot and a half from the witness post, which is one reason it was so frustrating. Bill93 and Z15, your posts espeically were pretty helpful.

Ok, I was looking for this benchmark the other day, and in the description it says "Access to the datum point is through a 5 inch logo cap." Any idea what that means? Looking back at the marker info, I also suspect that I didn't know exactly what I was looking for when I was there. The marker is listed as a Flange-encased rod, and the setting a stainless steel rod w/o sleeve. Found the witness post without any trouble, never did find the marker though .

While it might seem that way, I did find it pretty useful when we took our summer vacation last year. We could get into the hotel room for the night, charge the batteries for both the gps and the digital camera in 30 minutes, and put the stuff away. And it's nice for when I decide to pick up and go somewhere, even if the batteries aren't charged I can be ready to go quickly. Also works well for the mouse and keyboard, because even if I don't have an extra set sitting in the charger, I can get the batteries recharged and ready to go again quickly. Given that I got most of the batteries on sale anyways, they didn't cost much more than regular nimh batteries, which is just icing on the cake .

I don't know about the geocaching part being torn from the headlines, but the main plot of the episode apparently was somewhat based on a true story (according to tvtome). Yes, it was buried, other than that I thought geocaching came off ok, although barely any exposure. But I know why I don't normnally watch L&O:CI, it seemed like every time I turned around they'd reached another conclusion and it seemed like the conclusion had nothing to do with what had happened up to that point. Amusing that within one week both L&O and CSI had gps tracking used to stalk someone.

Ray-o-vac seems to have been the first company that made them, I've found them at basically any store that sells rechargeable batteries. Recently I saw some energizer batteries marked as 15 minutes too, but I honestly couldn't tell you if the charging systems are compatible with each other. I use the ray-o-vacs, and would be hard pressed to go back to normal charging speeds. My charger will do 4 AA or AAA's in 15 minutes, and will plug into the wall or into the car.

Ah, Death Valley is a blast to drive around in. On the back roads there you can litteraly be out in the middle of nowhere, and see no real signs of civilization. I remember one day I spent out there where the only road I actually saw another car on (besides the main roads in the valley) was the one with the big yellow sign advising against driving on the road . Out of curiosity, where are you in that shot?

Even assuming you could time your jump properly, you can't impart enough vertical speed with a jump to counteract the downward speed of the elevator. A person jumping up is only getting about 2-5 mph (briefly), while the elevator is falling far faster than that. As mentioned above, mythbusters did a pretty good job on this one. Some of their "proofs" at time have to be taken with a grain of salt, but in this episode they did a fair job of showing the math showing that it's a hopeless cause. And Buster the crash-test dummy was pretty good evidence that you didn't want to be in the elevator. (They rigged him to "jump" right before the elevator would hit bottom.)

The only thing that astounds me in this thread is how many people don't use rechargeable batteries. I'm astounded that people are using alkalines in something that goes through batteries as quickly as it does. I love my 15 minutes rechargeable ray-o-vac batteries. That said, given the number of people that seem to use alkalines, then I'd personally say it definitely makes a good item to leave.

According to track log I topped mine out at 102.5 mph when driving on the bonneville salt flats. Ok, yeah, that's not hugely impressive for a car, although I'll at least plead that it was a Jeep Grand Cherokee, so you wouldn't want to make any abrupt turns at that speed. (Speedo was reading about 105, wobbly) Does make one hell of a salty mess of the underbody though. Even after spraying the bottom we were still dropping salt for quite a while later.

Out of curiosity, do people actually use the geocaching mode on the 60c? I've looked at it briefly, but never felt that it really added anything to make it worth using, especially since I'd rather have different icons for different types of caches which is incompatible with it. I'm just kinda wondering if I'm missing something that should be obvious on why people would use this mode. As for the recent cases discussion, I don't use a case myself, largely because I hate having the plastic cover the buttons. Without that I'd probably consider one.

The hours figuring out the puzzle is probably spent in an area where bleeding to death by mosquito is probably not a problem .

Ok, assuming I'm following this right, why not put the next points directions in the previous point? So point 1 would contain the conditional directions for point 2. Obviously this doesn't work if you don't have actual cache locations for each stage, but would make it harder to shortcut if you did. And if they didn't know how many stops there were, you couldn't even skip a stage.

I'd just like to put a plug in for USAphotomaps. Don't have a picture handy to demonstrate, but I find it does a nice job of showing just how inept a path I took to the cache was.

Man, one of these days I really need to visit that museum. It has screwy hours as I recall though.

If I make an effort to find a cache and don't find it, I'll post a DNF. If I'm there only briefly for some reason, and feel that the likely reason I didn't find it, I'll post a note saying that I didn't find it, but that it was probably because of my time constraints. A couple weekends ago I went to look for a cache, started down the trails in the general direction, but decided that I didn't want to deal with ankle deep mud. I posted this as a note, because I didn't really feel I made an attempt to find the cache itself. But I did note it, so at least people coming after me could see an indication of the conditions they might find.

Ran into this one myself, I eventually ended up looping the lanyard around my camera bag strap so it couldn't fall. While I haven't tried it myself, and it would make removing the knob somewhat more difficult, I suspect using some threadlock would help the cause. Depends on whether you ever remove the knob .

I'm not saying I agree with the Boulder County people (heck, if they have an opinion, generally the opposite opinion makes the most sense), but I do feel they have one issue that indeed has merit. One thing I've noticed frequently in cache's I've visited is a pretty obvious "geocacher trail" where the vegetation has been beaten down headed towards the cache. I've even had at least one cache where I decided not to do it, because I could tell where it was, and didn't feel like it was appropriate to do the damage on the vegetation to get to it. The more people leave the trail and end up causing a distinguishable trail, the more other people are going to try following it just to see where it goes.

Dumb question. For those of you running it on the outside of your car, are you using some sort of re-radiating antenna? Basically I'm just kinda wondering how you get the cable into the car to where the gps is if you aren't.

Especially if you think the 56M is enough memory, the best way to decide this is go to a store that carries both, and hold them in your hand. There's just no beating this for making a decision on which you'll like better. For me, it led me to buy the 60cs, because I felt it worked in my hand better (I like the buttons on the bottom too). Others feel the 76c/s fits in their hand well, and prefer the buttons on the top. There's just no substitute for that hands on feel.

Well, while rattlesnakes may not have been used intentionally, they certainly have been known to take up residence around a cache (some of the hiding spots people use are prime spots for a snake to hide). I was reading a series of logs recently that mentioned several people seeing the same snake. I'd be far more concerned about that type of situation than someone intentionally booby trapping a cache.

For me, I went with the cs because the difference was somewhere along the lines of $20-$30 when I bought it. For that I figured it didn't make much difference. I've used the compass some, but personally I'd probably not miss it if it wasn't there. (Although it's been usefull at times to stand still and rotate around until I'm pointed where the cache should be). The compass can be somewhat awkward at times because it has to be held completely level.