HIPS-meister

One of the most common places where a cache is hidden in a lightpole is inside the base: the cover pulls up. The cache might be attached inside the cover! If the cover does not move very easily, "it's not there." There are definitely some "evil alternatives" to hiding something on the traditional light-pole. Don't walk up to an area that features a lightpole and simply assume that the cache is actually there! Evil-cachers sometimes use a lightpole as a thirty-foot-tall red herring! Danger: There is also very high voltage electricity inside a lightpole. The "hot" areas should be covered with access-plates, but ... A lightpole's interior and undersides "ist nicht fur gerfingerpoken und mittengrabben!" Be careful.

Remember that when you use your compass for reference, you need to obtain your bearings from far away. There are always two unknowns. Not only do you never know (1) exactly where the cache is, you also never know (2) exactly where you are. The GPS presents "bearing and distance" information to you as though it did somehow know the exact answer, but of course, it never does. The farther away you are from the cache, the less negative influence this (unavoidable) fact will exert upon the bearing that you receive. A distance of at least 100 yards is best. A precision compass is required, set to "zero degrees" declination. This probably shouldn't be something that you buy right away.... Remember also that you need to let your GPS "settle down" for about a minute, and that you should turn-on your GPS well before you arrive at the search site. This gives the GPS time to acquire a database of "recent position fixes" which it can use to give you more reliable information. Beyond this... probably the most valuable thing you can use to find a cache is experience, and maybe a little brainstorming. ("What would you do to hide a cache around here?") Travelling with a more-experienced cacher, in a "guided tour," can be a great way to get started. Perserverence helps. Sometimes you will not find the cache on your first visit, or even your second or third. (I personally enjoy caches that challenge me in this way, although not everyone does.) Don't blame your unit, the cache setter, or yourself. It's part of the game. And, if the search takes you to a pleasant place in the woods or in a park or somesuch, don't forget to enjoy being there, not just "the hunt!"

I have been on many a trail, plotting my progress for fun using my GPS, when the batteries died. Not once has this developed into a crisis; nor should it. Here are some very important things to remember: => Never hike alone. You and your hiking buddy should have both GPSes and maps-and-compass. You should always stay together. => Always carry several fresh sets of batteries for your GPS. => Always have a current topographic map (on waterproof paper) for the area you will be in. You can now print these easily, so carry two apiece. => Carefully mark your starting (car...) position both with a GPS waypoint and on your map. Every half-hour or hour, using your watch, observe your position. Mark it on the map, including the time-of-day, and write it on the reverse side of the printed map. => Practice with your compass to familiarize yourself with your surroundings at each stop, and to confirm the coordinates obtained by your GPS. Note the magnetic declination in your area! (In fact it's a good idea to determine your position "the old fashioned way" first, then check against the GPS.) And by the way, it's a fun thing to do during a rest-break. => Turn your GPS off in-between checks. Do not carry it in your hand. And, umm, be sure you don't accidentally leave anything behind! => Carry spare pens and pencils and writing paper. => A methodical, careful, habitual technique is wise. It also encourages you to take restful breaks. Now, if the unthinkable happens ... you and your hiking buddy are both without GPS information ... you have a complete breadcrumb record of where you have been. You have stopped and looked at your surroundings at each point. You are familiar with them. The situation is well under control. You are not lost. If you now find yourself having to navigate back out without your GPS as a reference, follow the same procedure of establishing your course, stopping every half-hour and checking your position, and writing that information down. (You and your hiking-buddy should do this separately, and check your answers.) You can easily find your way back to your car using these techniques and the other tricks that can be found in any book on using basic map-and-compass techniques in the woods. It is a very serious mistake to go out into the woods, even "familiar" ones, without a solid backup navigational technique and the practiced knowledge of how to use them.

Really, "on the ground" (much less even partially "buried"), can be a very problematic place for a cache. It doesn't take much ground-cover detrius to make the darned thing impossible to find, much less dirty! While "X marks the spot" does have a certain amount of "curb appeal" at first glance, it can really translate to a not-so-good cache and I would not recommend doing it.

My Dad purchased a top-end Garmin, I think the StreetPilot 2620. It has a little hard-disk inside with all the US maps and room to spare. So every now and then I get a call from the RV and I ask 'em where they are today. When you are doing street navigation, especially in LA what you want is a nice, bright display and a loud talker. You want a fast CPU that can keep up with you and pretend, at least, to think on its feet. (Radar would be nice. ) You might pay close to $1,000 for such a unit ... but if you drive for a living just write it off on your taxes.

The technique does not work, period. The math is unequivocal. And what is especially funny, given your invoation of statistics, is that the math has nothing to do with statistics! It's quite simple geometry; anybody with a year of high-school geometry could prove your assertion wrong. Ahh, there's the rub: This is not a geometry problem. It has very little if anything to do with geometry. It is a probability problem. Let's dump the language of geometry. Let's not call it "bearings." Let's call it "frozbits." Your meter tells you which frozbit to take to get to where you want to go. You punch in a frozbit number and a distance, push the magic yellow button, Scotty activates the Transporter on the starship Enterprise, and you wind up "there." If you are very close to the cache then in the worst case there are 360 possible frozbit-numbers that you could see on your machine; any one of which could be equally right. (Scotty will start complaining about strained dilithium-crystals soon...) If you are thirty feet away there are about 90 possible frozbits. (That Starbucks is starting to sound really good.) From five hundred feet away, there are only four or five possible frozbit numbers that you could see on your machine. (And as a free bonus, now one of those four is considerably more probable than the others, if you let your frozbit-machine settle down.) Why, then, is it better to be far away? Because your odds of getting it right are now one in four, instead of one in three-sixty. Whether you now use that information by pressing a yellow button, or by taking a compass bearing and going for a walk, it all works out the same! Why is this not actually a geometry problem? Because: geometry has to do with points. It is not the mathematics of regions. Geometry must have at least one known point. Your GPS pretends that you are precisely at the point where it thinks it is, and that the cache is precisely where the owner said it was .. thus two points .. and it gives you a bearing between those two points as if they were correct, but knowing that it isn't. What the GPS gives you is therefore, "a bearing plus or minus x degrees," and the $99.99 question is: how large is x? More to the point: what can we do, in the field, to minimize the possible range of "x?" By moving far away, I reduced x from 360 to 4. To make that work, I used a $60 compass. Surely you cannot argue with me that: if your GPS is not precisely knowledgeable of your position, (as we have agreed)... it necessarily follows that: ... it cannot be precisely knowledgeable about your bearing to any other point either, whether that point is known or is estimated. And it certainly cannot be precisely knowledgeable about the proper bearing if both points are estimates! If we cannot agree on this, truly we cannot agree on any thing. Being no more able than anyone else to alter these bullet-points, I arranged myself in space to reduce the influence of these inevitable sources of error. I like having four ways to go instead of more than three hundred.

You want to hear something incredibly counter-intuitive? Let's say that the GPS does calculate the cache position to be "off by 50 feet." It's perfectly possible for that to happen, say with an accuracy circle of 25 feet and a DOP of 2.0. There are things that you can do to improve this (like continuous reception, otherwise known as letting your GPS "settle down," but it's perfectly possible for the position fix to be "off by 50 feet." The counter-intuitive thing is that ... the farther away you are from the cache, the less that 50-foot discrepancy matters. No, it won't get you closer than the accuracy of the original reading (which, if really off by 50 feet, ought to be reported to and adjusted by the owner), but it will reduce the effective impact of that discrepancy upon your search time. By and large, though, cache owners are very careful in their work, and after a few successful finds, the odds of the coordinates "still" being seriously off are pretty darned small. Real geocachers don't blame the cache-owner nor their equipment. I didn't open up this thread over here to repeat the other one, which is now closed. The technique works, period. The mathematical reasons behind it may not be obvious (probability problems usually aren't), but they are quite sound.

The single most crucial point ... that is repeatedly being overlooked and/or discounted ... is that there is not one but two unknowns at work in this problem: (1) your location; and (2) the position of the cache. It may seem unimportant that your GPS and the owner's GPS simultaneously played by the same rules, but it truly is the crux of my point. When you look at your GPS and it says, "I am here!" it is very easy to think that you are at a known position and that only the GPS is at an unknown position. It is very easy to think that you are at a known point and that the cache is located in a nearby region. It is also very easy to think that, "even if I am 'also in an unknown region,' it really doesn't make any practical difference." My point, and it is an "ah haa-a-a-a-h..." point, is that it actually does. If you normally look for caches in areas where there are only a few realistic possibilities to choose from ("this light pole or that one") once you get close to the area, then your reliance upon visual clues and learned experience make any excessive precision in advance navigation of very little practical use to you. But, when you are devoid of such "additional clues," it can make all the difference. You cannot, by definition, improve upon the accuracy of the cache-owner's GPS. You cannot make your final search-area encompass an area any smaller than the one dictated by the owner's GPS. Your objective is simply to limit your search-area so that it is, insofar as possible, no larger than the owner's area. And this is what the compass technique very-effectively does. Unfortunately, I don't think it will benefit anyone to belabor this point further. Enough has been said.

Like I said, I'm not going to resurrect the topic from the other thread, and I see no particular reason to belabor that point despite the abundance of gauntlets that are being thrown down here. Get out there in the field, away from all those silly light-posts, and try it for yourself.

"A well known error in the handhelds <you> use?" Well, you've certainly picqued my curiosity, and I daresay I'm not the only one. Care to elaborate?

To a certain extent, the technique you describe exploits the fact that, when the GPS sees you proceeding on a certain bearing at a certain speed, it will assume that you have continued to do so even when the data-stream says otherwise (or when it has been cut-off, as in a tunnel). If you proceed in a bee-line toward the cache location as the GPS started to calculate it from a comparatively long distance away, this computational feature of the GPS will give you improved accuracy -- as it was intended to do. Should you "wander," and/or should you have turned-on your GPS for the first time only when you were getting fairly close, this feature would be of little value. Then, having become accustomed from past experience to your GPS appearing to be highly accurate, you may be startled and frustrated by the fact that it "inexplicably" isn't. You may follow the bee-line to an area, fail to find the cache right away, look down at the GPS and notice that "suddenly it's not so sure anymore." And, lo(!), it isn't. This may be why. I encourage you to try this and to see what works for you.

No, I don't intend to resurrect that other discussion, but I can .. very briefly .. recap why this technique works. The key to understanding this improvement is to carefully consider all of the implications of the fact that there are two, not just one, things that you do not know: You do not know exactly where the cache is (of course), nor the error experienced by the cache-owner, and... You do not know exactly where you are. Both of these figures may be presented to you as "exact" numbers, but in fact there is a region of "possible points on earth" that could produce the same result. The size of this region varies according to the usual factors... sattelite position, clouds, tree cover, and so-on. It's what gives us a sport, of course. (Most graphic GPSes will show it to you with a circle drawn on the screen.) But that's only one of the regions: there are two. Not one... two! Two! Two! Two! Given that you cannot know either of these two locations with certainty, even though the GPS may pretend that you do, when you are close to the cache those two sources of error tend to combine into a larger region. Maybe a much larger region: an eighteen-foot circle could be 3 x 18 = 54 feet wide. Furthermore, when the two circles overlap, your bearing-to-target could be any number at all, and you have no way to know which one is right. That "little pointer" you're relying on, literally does not know which way to go, so it may lead you around in circles. (Or it may not: it may be perfectly accurate. Such is the nature of probability problems. The trick is, you don't know for sure until you find the cache. ) When the two regions are hundreds of feet apart, there is one thing that you can know with great certainty: the bearing shown on your GPS screen will be very close to "the (unknowable) 'right' answer." If you imagine a box that's eighteen feet wide and four hundred feet long, there's one thing you can say about that box: it's very narrow! If you were to shine a flashlight down the length of it, you couldn't twist your hand too far to the left or to the right or the beam of light wouldn't come out the other end (without bouncing off the walls a time or two). At the yonder end of that box, yep, there's still a region and it's still eighteen feet wide. (You can't ever do anything about that, unless you are a surveyor.) But it's not "eighteen plus eighteen plus another eighteen" feet wide. And this can be a really, really big, really helpful difference out in the field. [Note: GPSes are very smart. If they've had time to collect hundreds of data points and they see that you are walking in a straight-line bearing, they're smart enough to assume .. at least for a while .. that you're probably still doing so. Therefore a "current position" value that's close to that expected location is more likely to be correct than an outlier, and it's given more weight in the computer's calculations. You can even see your GPS continuing to plot your location when you've driven into a tunnel... pure guesswork since the data-stream has been cut off. If you walk straight toward your target, that plays to your advantage. But if you get stumped and start to wander around... so does your GPS.] All that I can say is... it does work. It does make a difference, and I simply encourage you to try it. There may be plenty of situations where it isn't necessary and a few evil ones where it perhaps-deliberately is made difficult-to-apply, (Who, me?) but when you need it, remember it and try it. 'Nuff said.

I'll echo my request here... I fully understand that PQ's are run by a batch process and that they take time to complete. What I would like to be able to do is to download the (zipped) result-file from the web-site, if I so choose, rather than accepting e-mail delivery of the result file. There are many situations, including on-the-road, when e-mail delivery is very unreliable and/or inconvenient. But I can very easily submit the query and "check back" to the geocaching site to see if it has completed. Then I could click on a hotlink and download the result. Then, I'd like to be able to delete the result from the website (don't assume the download was successful!), or allow it to expire on its own after a couple of days. The only change that would occur is how the finished result-file is handled, not how (or when) it is produced. In my painful experience, e-mail should not be relied-upon as a guaranteed-successful delivery mechanism.

A clever cache that is "hidden in plain sight" is something that simply tries not to attract your first-glance. When the viewer's attention is finally focused on the thing ... ... there should be something which "gives it away." The very best caches (imho) are the ones that "upon first glance are totally plausible, but upon closer inspection are totally wrong." For example, a blank electrical switch plate, held on by magnets. A fake birdhouse. A fake drain-tube. A fake rock. I, too, would be very uncomfortable opening or fooling with an electrical box. But if I saw the geocaching logo faintly scratched into the paint, or something like that, I would know that "I've been had." You need to always think your ideas through carefully -- in the case of an electrical-box it might mean placing the cache far away from where any live electricity could possibly be, so that a person who's skittish might not find your cache, but someone who's bold also cannot actually get hurt.

One figure you should keep an eye on is DOP (Dilution Of Precision). This figure should be as close to 1.0 as possible when you take your "final" reading. You really want to have a couple of minutes during which the DOP was never more than 1.5 when you punch-in your accepted coordinate. If someone then says that "your coordinates are off," you should promptly return to the cache-site and re-check them. (Mistakes do happen, no matter how hard you try.) I think that it's very important that, following any NF's that say such things, you should be on-your-toes and post a followup note ... confirming that the problem was corrected, or that the cache is "pure evil" ... ... But responding, and in a timely manner, nonetheless.

... in the form of a Brunton 8099 compass. $60-odd(USD) at the local map store. The advantage of a compass of this type is that it allows measurements to be accurately taken "from 500 feet away with 1-degree accuracy," which is exactly what I need to do. As a simple example of how I use this tool, I located a cache in Camelback Mountain Park (Phoenix, AZ) then used my compass to check the location as I proceeded to the next cache. From 500 feet away the compass not only told me which boulder concealed the first cache, but which side it was on. Now I turned my attention to the next cache I was searching for. Using the compass once again, I learned exactly where to look for the cache I was about to find, from about 120 feet away. I walked directly to it. The key to my technique, as I have already discussed here in other threads, is distance to the target. If you simply "follow the pointer until you get close" to a cache, you'll soon discover that below a certain distance the GPS can no longer tell you which way to go. You may also have noticed that the bearing changes more and more the closer you get; conversely, the bearing changes very little if you are still far away. So, seeking to use that very fact to my advantage, this is what I do: When the expected location of the cache is in-sight, I stop near a prominent landmark that I expect to be able to see from there, and let my GPS settle for about a minute. Next, I take the bearing from my GPS and dial it in to the compass. I now sight along this bearing to see where I want to go. If the range-to-target is uncertain, I repeat the procedure from one or two locations to either side, triangulating on the target. I walk to the location and take back-bearings (using the south-seeking end of the needle) on the landmarks previously chosen to confirm my exact position. (You can be a few feet off and not know it, and "a few feet" makes a difference.) I now search, within the expected area of uncertainty that the GPS owner would have seen, being confident that I am very close to the spot where he or she once stood. I do not use my GPS at all once I have established the search bearing, except as a guess-timator of distance-traveled if I chose to take only one bearing. (e.g. when I'm pretty sure where the cache will be along the line, but of course don't want to be "surprised.") Next Toy: a bowhunter's optical rangefinder... This technique not only works; it works very well. When you work from a distance, the "combined uncertainty" that comes from not knowing where the cache is nor where you are .. the combination that leaves you walking in circles .. begins to "cancel out" so that you're left with not much more uncertainty than the original cache-owner had. If you take your time to let your GPS settle, and you take your time with the compass-work, you can (it has happened to me) discover the cache literally by stepping on it. The features of a compass of this type are important: the compass has one free-floating pointer, with a circle, and a separate fixed dial with a slightly wider circle. You sight on the target, then with the mirror turn the dial until the circles coincide, then read your bearing. (Red and blue lines extending across the two dials facilitate back-bearings.) It's a two-step process. And, if you take your time doing it and re-check your work, you'll get 1-degree precision. (Set the magnetic declination to zero degrees since you are working throughout in magnetic bearings.) From a 500-foot distance, I find that the bearing is usually spot-on, or +/- 1-degree or maybe 2. Thus the need for precision. Happy caching! Hope This Helps!

There are two basic coordinate-systems: latitude/longitude and UTM. As you have seen, lat/long coordinates can be expressed using "degrees, minutes, seconds," or with "degrees, minutes," where the minutes are expressed as a decimal number with a fraction. UTM is a different system that is entirely metric. Covering a broad equatorial band of the earth's surface, it maps everything to kilometer-sized squares and can express locations in meters. It is quite handy for navigation using map-and-compass. Neither system is "more accurate" than the other; they are simply different. And what's important to observe is, simply, what coordinate system is being used for the waypoint you want to enter. "ddd mmm.mmmm" (degrees and fractional minutes) is most common; the website also provides UTM versions.

It seems curious to me why I cannot, if I choose, download the entire result of a pocket-query through http://. I can download one page at a time, so why not the entire result? The e-mail protocol is actually not-very-reliable anymore, especially with messages of any "large" size. Likely as not, these messages simply won't arrive. It would be very nice if the download file .. zipped, of course .. could simply be "left in my box for me to pick up." The most recent version of the file is simply "there." If this were available, I probably would never request e-mail delivery at all. (Perhaps just an e-mail notification...)

I tend to just leave logs alone. If someone wants to claim a find that s/he didn't make, then who's to lose except that individual? I'm certainly not going to go out to the cache, write down the names that are in it, and "grade their work." This is supposed to be entertainment.

Every cache is different. Guidelines are just that ... guidelines.

Hmm, if you think that's the only thing you can do for a light-pole cache... well, I can't say exactly where it is. But I can say that, when you fail-to-find the cache at "the usual spot," you're probably staring right at the darned thing but don't know it. It's not my cache but it's a good'un.

Hmmm.... That's the sort of piece that's designed to grab a headline. All of which makes me wonder what else the legislatures in question might be up to while everyone's attention is distracted elsewhere. It sure sounds like a red-herring to me...

Clearly, this is a gray-area. If the description of "how to get to a cache" says, "walk along a railroad right-of-way..." well, yes, I think that I, too, would have some legitimate concerns about that. You see, to a certain extent, geocaching is "public entertainment." And we ... we who place caches, and we who verify & approve them ... we are the entertainers. I think it's wise and prudent to err on the side of caution, to be conservative and careful. Call it quality-control... Or call it just trying to go the extra mile to give our audience, the cache seeker, the best quality of entertainment that we can. The world abounds with great locations for a cache. This doesn't sound like a good one to me; not at all. So, let's put our thinking-caps on a little harder and pick another, better place to put that cache. After all, the cache-seeker could be a seven year old boy. And there could be a train coming. Why risk it? Why send our trusting audience there? We owe them the very best experience we can devise, and I'm sure we can do better.

I happen to love the idea of letterboxing, orienteering, finding survey markers, and all those "other" variations of hide-n-seek. No matter how you slice it, it's a fun puzzle and the game is to solve it. By all means, try these things sometime. You might like them!

Your local Wallie's or Uncle "K" (Wal-Mart, K-mart) can provide some very useful supplies for your geocaching pursuits... and one of them that you are sure to soon encounter in-the-field is "cammo tape." This is a variety of duct-tape which is printed with an intricate camouflage pattern resembling leaves, bark, and other ground-cover. Most stores carry rolls that are appropriate to the geography of their local area, and they do differ. Adding camouflage to a box "breaks up the sight lines" that ordinarily help you to determine that there is a container there. A little debris placed around the container in a plausible location fools your eye into "accepting" what it sees without really calling your attention to it. Cammo-tape is also very useful for concealing much smaller objects, like the ubiquitous 35mm film-can. A small or large object that is hidden beneath, or even in, shrubbery can be very difficult to spot. If you are placing caches, even in an urban setting, some simple kind of camouflage can greatly extend the "lifespan" of your cache. I believe that it is always very important to label your cache on the outside, explaining to anyone who sees it what it is and that it's all-right to open it and look inside. A brown "Sharpie" indelible-marker will do the job without standing out too much against the tape.