HIPS-meister

The most common setting is, of course, "magnetic north," so that you can take a bearing and apply it immediately to your compass without adjustment. You just turn your boat to the specified magnetic bearing and you're good to go... If you were taking a bearing from your GPS and plotting it out on your topo-map, it would be helpful to briefly set your GPS to true-North.

Does it sound strange for me to say that I often just don't get around to it? That to me it is a tedious chore, and since I'm really not out to "get numbers" anyway, I'll usually actually log a cache when I have something that I specifically want to say to the cache owner and/or to the subsequent seekers.

The purpose of the UTM grid is to express locations in terms of a hypothetical square, metric matrix that is superimposed upon a band around the earth that is sufficient to encompass most inhabited and traveled areas. Even though a square matrix cannot be exactly fitted to a globe, the UTM is a very good approximation. And the basic unit of measure is "an actual kilometer on the surface of the earth." Which coordinate system you use is entirely up to you. Many GPSes can, in fact, display your position in both systems at the same time.

The beauty of this sport is that everyone can play .. for their own reasons. If numbers and "high scores" are what's fun to you, then you can have fun. And if not, you can still have fun. And fun is what it's all about. The puzzle, the challenge, in Geocaching is curiously personal: it's "you and the cache-setter." The one who sets the puzzle and the one who solves it. Those who compete, can compete; and those who don't compete, can not-compete; all without affecting each other's enjoyment of the game in the slightest. Very few games have this characteristic as clearly as Geocaching does. The bottom line is, I think... If Geocaching gets you see more of this wonderful world and the amazing things that are in it, for whatever reason you name, then it has certainly been a success for you. All we need to bear in mind, e.g. on forums like these, is that "nothing's 'wrong.'"

Well, Google has fun with every holiday... (Ready to do more programming, Jeremy, now that you've "volunteered?" )

This may well not apply in your case, but ... Make sure that the "map datum" is set to the standard setting used by geocaching.com, which is WGS84 If you have it set to something else, you may find that your navigation is consistently off. Also make sure that your GPS receiver has had several minutes with a clear view of the sky before you use it for navigation especially if you have not used it recently. It uses this time to collect position-estimates for averaging purposes, and to make sure that its "almanac" database is up-to-date.

Are any of these state representatives freshmen, or up for re-election? In most legislatures, any member can propose anything, no matter if it makes rational sense and no matter if it has a ghost of a chance of passing, or of surviving a court challenge if it did pass. And some members will use that for political brownie-points, even if it makes them look like utter morons. "South Carolina's tax dollars at work...?" Arizona Highways magazine has a special feature on geocaching as this month's online article at their web-site. A recently commissioned local magazine called xplor just featured it. Backpacker just did an article. Meanwhile, South Carolina's finest did this? "Wah, shoot fahr, Bertha, looky here ..." (spit) "... We'll show 'dem jeeo-cashers a thang or too about how we does things around heayh.." Yeah, give those august legislators a nice red star to wear around their necks ... where the colors, it would seem, will blend right in... Sheesh.

This license-fee is very nominal, and the penalties for unlicensed broadcasts can, of course, be severe. But maybe that's not the point. Maybe there's something to be said for "you get what you pay for." The CB bands are useless, polluted with vulgar people who essentially cannot be stopped. Contrast this with the discipline of the (licensed) Amateur Radio bands, where not only are the participants clearly identified by means of call-signs, but the entire use of the frequencies is treated with obvious and rather formal respect. That sort of discipline, which owes itself in part to the license requirement, is what makes these bands such a joy to use. P.S. If you haven't looked into the Amateur Radio licensing requirements lately, "code is gone for 2-meters" and these licenses are now quite easy to get. In the long run you might find them to be a much more satisfactory communications solution than the already-crowded FRS/GMRS bands. 73S DE KC7HEA...

I also enjoy orienteering, although simply as a hobby and not in competition. It's a very, very good skill to know, and it's fun because it really teaches you to observe and to be aware. To me, that really enhances the enjoyment of being outdoors in the first place. If you simply "hike to your destination," you can fail to see anything along the way.

Part of the enjoyment of geocaching, I think, is the fact that... once the GPS unit has gotten you close to where the cache is hidden, you still have "the thrill of the hunt." When the GPS unit says that you're, say, within 50 feet of the cache ... start looking at the surroundings and using your wits. Read the description for clues. Take the time to actually enjoy where you are. No sattelite navigation technology available to civilians will ever allow you to "simply walk up to" the target coordinate, and if it could, obviously there would be no hobby.

GPSes are electronic devices, much like computers, that should not be affected by scanners. I routinely carry them in my carry-on luggage; I do not routinely check them through.

"850 feet" is clearly a typographic error. It happens, sometimes. All you can do is to privately e-mail the cache owner offline to alert him/her to the problem so that the posted coordinates can be corrected.

I like to find caches that take me to someplace I didn't know existed. A pretty spot, maybe miles out in the woods. I like to find clever caches, "hidden in plain sight" caches, and things that are historically interesting. I'm not in it "for the numbers," and finding 35mm film canisters under lamp posts has long ago lost its appeal. I'll drive right past the shopping-center parking lots brimming with waypoints on my way to "something different."

I don't qualify either but ... Go out there and have fun. Stop and smell the flowers, or the lamp-posts. "If you go somewhere and don't enjoy just being there, you musta gone to the wrong place." Don't get bent out of shape if you don't find the cache right away. The GPS will take you to the area, and then you can just start thinking about where you might hide something. It could be camo'd. It could be under a lightpole; even velcro'd to the base. Lots of places; try them all. And if you don't find it the first time, move along and plan to come back. Go with a friend. Besides being more fun, four eyes are better than two.

My experience with elevation-figures, with several GPSes, is that they're not particularly useful, nor particularly accurate. In terms of a waypoint, this figure is unimportant.

Except for the machete part ... ... that's a pretty good assessment. Experiment and find the kinds of caches, and the kinds of cache locations, that appeal to you. If you don't feel comfortable looking for a particular cache, go on to the next one. For example, I love to find (and set) caches that take me to historically interesting, out-of-the-way places that might be right in the middle of a town but overlooked by everybody every day as they rush to work. I also like caches that take me to parks, out in the woods, or to great vistas. As my nick implies, I generally set up "Hidden-In-Plain-Sight" caches, and I love to talk about new "evil" ways to do these kinds of hides, even if I'll never have the opportunity to visit all those caches myself. They're puzzles, of a sort, and I enjoy puzzles. Oh, I might go on a "cache run" with friends just to be with friends, but I really don't care about "numbers." Maybe you do. The trick is to experiment, find something you like, and just .. enjoy yourself. The beauty of this sport, as I see it, is that it isn't competitive: it's a one-on-one battle of wits between you, as an individual, and the owner of the cache. Or maybe the find is a very easy one, and what the cache-owner has really done for you is simply to introduce you to a spot on earth that they found particularly beautiful or interesting.

If your GPS contains a built-in magnetic compass, then it will be as accurate as any magnetic compass should be. Now, personally, I prefer to use an external compass because I want to see the needle for myself. If your GPS does not contain a built-in magnetic compass, then its estimate of your present course is based on recent location-fixes and is therefore only an approximation. The longer you maintain a single bearing, and the faster you travel along that bearing, the better its estimate of your actual bearing will be. However, "nothing beats a compass." As for the bearing to the target, that's a different matter. In this case, the computer simply calculates the angle between the lat/long of the entered waypoint and the lat/long obtained from your last position fix. If that position fix somehow could be "point accurate," and the published location of the cache likewise could be "point accurate," then it would be an exact bearing indeed. But the reality is that neither one of these locations is known with absolute certainty. Therefore this bearing-to-the-target figure will always be variable, and sometimes may be wildly inaccurate. You will find that the bearing-to-target on your GPS is quite reliable when you are several hundred feet away, because the combined effects of the two uncertainties (+/- 20 feet or so, say...) tend to cancel out, and never really add up to much, at that distance. This is therefore a really good place to use a compass. I have one (~$60) that allows me to take sightings with great accuracy. As you get closer to the cache location, the bearing-to-target becomes less and less useful, until finally, when both you and the cache are "inside the circle" drawn on the GPS screen, it is completely useless. (You may as well put your GPS away at that point.) I recently completed a very enjoyable cache in Memphis, TN that was promised to be "very evil," and it was ... or would have been if I had been relying upon the GPS. So I found it using my compass: an XXX-degree-magnetic bearing line followed for Y00 feet through the woods resulted in me just-about bumping into the right mumble-mumble. Nuttin' to it.

The base-map in my Garmin (which is a high-end navigational model) is a 20-mile map. Features closer than this resolution don't exist. The purchased maps are frought with errors, but if you consider the never-ending enormous task involved in maintaining a nationwide map database, I guess that it's overall pretty good. Definitely, some of the roads in both Garmin's and Magellan's base-map databases are substantially incorrect.

The accuracy figure does change quite frequently, and sometimes over a very considerable range, even if you are standing still. Nothing to be alarmed about. Expect your GPS to get you close to the general area, but expect nothing more than that. Don't try to "follow the needle" right to where "X marks the spot" because that can never actually happen. Your true position on earth is just as unknown as the cache's true position; both calculations are (were) subject to error. Those error conditions change constantly.

There are, obviously, two general types of PDAs out there .. Palm and Windows. * Which type do you prefer, and why? * What is the actual practical capacity of your unit, in terms of number of caches stored and so forth?

I think that religion is a personal, private matter and that a cache is probably not a good forum for it, well-intentioned though you might be.

Start your GPS well before you arrive. Walk to the location and place your unit with clear view of the sky as you arrange the cache in position. Mark the location before you leave. All cache-locations are approximate coordinates. If people report that "your coords are a little off," promptly check them and make corrections as needed.

There are a lot of caches in our area where the "obligatory light pole" is a flat-out red herring. Keeping your mind open as you hunt for a cache might be the most important consideration of all! Never assume.

The beauty of this sport is that there can be something in it for everyone, including players whom the original founders of the sport never dreamed of. That's an odd consequence of advanced technology. The DOD never imagined their system being used to locate manhole covers, much less 35mm film canisters. People for whom "a geocache" means "a walk in the woods" might look with scorn at lightpoles. But... to each his own. Of the hundreds or thousands of caches that might show up in some area-query, some people will adopt the "Pokemon principle" .. gotta try them all. While others, and I'd probably place myself in the same category, might select from that list a half-dozen that look interesting and wind up visiting only three of them, and be perfectly content. I think that we do need to continuously push to encourage people to think of and to try new ideas. But the secret, I think, is to encourage these new branches and explorations: there's really almost no reason to dictate them. (Necessary authority should be exercised with great restraint.) Given ready access to new ideas, and a free hand, people will be naturally inventive and the sport will continue to be Fun... with little or no "limits" being imposed upon it by anyone. Just plunk a seed into the ground, pour on some water, stand back, and watch! ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... . The secret, if there is one, would be "give back to the community the sort of caches that you like best." Geocachers in wheelchairs are out there, setting up caches that others with their limitations can enjoy. Folks who get their jollies by climbing on ropes are setting caches that you can only climb on ropes to get to. Scuba jockies are putting caches under water. In this way, the various naturally-occurring subgroups of cachers within the overall community naturally supply themselves with the kind of entertainment they enjoy. If that happens to include a lot of newbies and/or lunchtime-cachers who put easy 1/1 grabs in urban settings... I say... terrific! Six months from now the game might have adjusted itself in yet a new direction.

When placing a cache, I try to give the finder some oblique hints as to the size, nature, and location of the cache ... hints that s/he may not understand fully until arriving at the site, but that will be helpful once there. I'll conceal hints anywhere -- even in the title. And I'll also include specific pointers, like "keep your feet on the ground." These will be put directly in the cache description when I want to instruct the finder quite specifically (e.g. what not to do... as in "do not climb on or in anything you see around here"); it will be in the encrypted-hint when it is a clue. I, too, believe that the web-site itself doesn't need any more options. But note that there are web-sites that can automatically generate HTML for putting symbols and icons in your description.