Thot

Well, maybe, but the gadget says it's only accurate to about 50’ (not 20), so one could think of it that this is an 80' radius – entry error of 30' plus location finding error of 50'. The person who provided the original coordinates probably wasn’t accurate to better than 10’. So, it seems the ambiguous circle could be as large as 180’ in diameter - 2 X (80 + 10) = 180. If the cache placer was using my GPS his error would be 50' not 10 so the total would be 2 x 130' or 260'. Now I think my original estimate of 120' was too small.

I grew up in a small town (pop 2000). For a few years I had a game I played where I would hide coins in unusual places around town then check them periodically to see if the coins were still there. I was absolutely amazed how people almost always found and took the coins. (Remember -- small town) I put them in places I thought nobody would ever look. As they kept finding them I began hiding them more and more securely, yet they kept finding them. To this day I can't imagine why anyone would look in many of these places, but they did. And coins are small and easy to hide. When I read about this hobby/game a couple of nights ago my coin game came to mind immediately. It would seem like random strangers would stumble on and remove or destroy these caches so often it would make the concept impractical. Then you have the malicious souls who learn of the game and delight in locating them using your directions and stealing them. So my question is, why doesn't this happen so much it defeats the game?

I’d never heard of geocaching until I stumbled onto it 2 nights ago, and it sounds like fun. I’d never seen a GPS receiver before this afternoon. A friend had a castoff Magellan GPS 315 he lent me to give this game a try. But this thing can only accept coordinates to the nearest hundredth minute. By my estimate that’s nearly 60 feet. This seems to mean it will have one standing in a 120 foot diameter circle of uncertainty trying to locate a hidden object. It seems like that would be quite a challenge if it’s anything more cluttered than an empty Walmart parking lot. The caches near me are in a semi-urban area, so it seems like a detailed street map would get you that close or closer. Am I missing something here?