BuckBrooke

kohldad, I've recovered a lot of SCALED stations along highways in NM, with almost exactly the text that you have used for your good recoveries. Especially for Not-Founds, a bit more text would be useful.

Well, it's not me. I just wrapped up an hour call from my half brother helping him with a pre-calculus problem (after hours). Now, I get to drive an hour home. I haven't had much benchmarking recently; I hope to get a dozen (half already found on Geocaching) this weekend on a state road that's been straightened, so a number of stations are on the old, fading not-used road. I ran into the old road/new road issue this past weekend when I tried for a few in a different area and found that the old road is very windy, very hard to get to and nearly impossible to find. I'm going back to that one after some research. How many marks are you logging? I generally divide my logs into Found, Not Found, Poor and Destroyed piles, which makes logging them easier. For half the stations no update is generally needed. About a quarter are SCALED, so I do a standard "Handheld coordinates are asdlkfja;sdlfja;slkfj;asljf" sort of log. The other quarter are tricky, as you have to come up with text. Stay on target by picking a format and sticking with it. I have unknowingly adopted an outwards-in approach that many people use, simply by mimicking other logs that I've read. Start with the largest reference, and work your way inwards, only writing changes. So, one of my logs might be: "The station description is adequate except for the following. NM State Route -1000 is now US -1200. The bridge has been widened to four lanes, and the station is now 6 feet west of the northwest headwall. The station was hit by machinery and is now tilted 30 degrees to the north. The station mark is otherwise in good condition." Stay on target, write the description, and the rest is easy.

Ok, I've updated the above submissions. Here are a few more, gleaned from the usual sources. Also, a dozen corrections/improved photos/rearrangements to the list. As usual, the largest number found are in California. Are there more people getting out and hiking there? Anyways, I've noticed that a fair number of the MN counties seem to have their own disks. Anybody from MN, could you verify this, and maybe supply a few more photos? From Waymarking: MWHASS (NJ) Michael W. Hyland Associates CoLOMP (CA) City of Lompoc CumbeI (CA) Cumberland Island FisAss (NY) Fisher Associates IDDoPW (ID) Idaho Department of Public Works - Right of Way [Type II] CinCWW (OH) Cincinnati Water Works HIPONC (NC) High Point SJRWMD (GA) St. John's River Water Management District PATCVC (PA) Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission - Vertical Control LEXICO (SC) Lexington County MONTCO (CA) Monterey County USNUGP (US) US Navy - US Government Property OKDoTR (OK) Oklahoma Department of Transportation [Type II] TOWINC (CA) Towhill, Inc. - Concord, CA CoFOPK (OH) City of Forest Park GADoNR (GA) Georgia Department of Natural Resources CofMoB (CA) City of Morro Bay From forum discussions: WIH&ST (FL) Williams, Hatfield and Stoner FPOCOC (IL) F.P.O. (F.P.D.?) Cook County From the Photo Gallery: AB5844 (MN) Crow Wing County DD4592 (SC) South Carolina Coastal Council [Type III] (cool disk) DC1876(CA) State of California Department of Highways MC1097 (US) National Geodetic Survey - Reference station [Type II] RO0841 (MN) Minnesota State Highway Department - Azimuth station DX4669 (CA) Orange County Surveyor [Type II] DX4667 (CA) Orange County Surveyor - Reference station QP0094 (US) Missouri River Commission [Type III] QP1899 (MN) Minnesota Dept. of Transportation - Reference Station

BDT, According to the BLM cadastral website, there are 3416 township and other corners in AZ, making the 200 estimate by AZcachemeister about 1/17, or 5.9%

monkeykat, The NGS database represents a very small fraction of the total number of disks that are out there. For example, the vast majority of disks put down by local, city and state agencies, or by private surveyors on their behalf, are not in the database. The USGS has hundreds of thousands of disks that were used to create their topographical maps. These are not in the NGS database. Another nationwide batch of non-database disks are the US C&GS and State Survey disks that were put down during the Great Depression. The majority of these (10s of thousands) are not in the NGS database. I'd go with Waymarking for your disk.

GPS Men, I have a few comments/questions which should help your search. Please bear with the comments, since I don't know what you have done online so far. 1) Have you searched those coordinates on the advanced benchmark search at Geocaching? If you find/found it there, it's easy to log. If not, continue below. 2) The FAQ Question #2 says in much more detail the following: There are millions of disks out there, most of which can't be logged in any way, many of which have been forgotten by whomever put them down. Especially a U.S. Bureau of Public Roads disk, which is really old. 3) You can "log" the mark by creating a waymark at the Waymarking category Recovered US Benchmarks. The FAQ tells you more.

Congrats, The BeanTeam! You should consider going back and reporting your other recent recovery reports, if you haven't done them all.

slippeddisk, What is the exact stamping on the disk? For example, does the disk have around the edge US Coast & Geodetic Survey Horizontal Control Mark and in the middle ALDA What other marks are on it? A triangle w/ dot, several crosses, etc.? Do you have a picture?

Max Cacher, could you move these two comments over to a new topic? Don't want to mix up topics. MedTexPlacer, Have you done a coordinate search on your disk, to find it in the database? What is the designation stamped on the disk? Do you have a photo? What is the agency stamped on the disk? All of these bits of information will help you/us to find your disk, if it's in the database. Odds are it isn't. Have you read the FAQ: Question 2 which describes your situation much more succinctly than I can. You should read through those questions/answers. The copy of the NGS database (not USGS) that Geocaching uses is from 2001, and there are no plans for Geocaching to update it. Betting that the disk that you've found is probably not in the NGS database, entering it at Waymarking, US Benchmarks is probably the way to go. Please send me a message if I can help answer your questions or help with your search.

Ok, I haven't ever used one, but here's a shot. It looks like duckboards, or duck boards, or duck-boards, are any board or large/long piece of wood laid down on mud or a surface to increase traction and facilitate work. Here's a picture of a military duckboard from Wikipedia: Here's the Merriam-Webster online dictionary definition: a boardwalk or slatted flooring laid on a wet, muddy, or cold surface -- usually used in plural Extrapolating to surveying, I bet duckboards would be boards put down on top of this tank to make the surveying easier; probably so that the legs of the surveyor's tripod/instrument could be supported, or supported more easily. It eavens out the ground, as it were.

I would suggest emailing Deb Brown and asking her.

Casey, Sorry about the typo. I didn't read carefully enough. Having two Randalls, or two Brennans, on the NGS team would be scary. As GEOCAC has now become the largest agency submitting recovery reports (thanks for the statistic, holograph), I'm glad ya'll are listening to our feedback. I'm not sure if it was mentioned it before, but I REALLY would like to have the confirmation page show all of the info I've inputted. Also, the GPS visibility should be a choice between 3 radial buttons on the submission page, instead of an additional page to click through. This would let me set it to "I don't know", which I always do, and leave that alone through the recoveries. It would also allow easy changes for people who give more specific information (YES/NO) for each station.

Bill93, I'm not advocating that DDD MM.MMM be added to the datasheets. Far from it. Right now, when you use the DDD.DDDDD option for searching for marks, it converts the coordinates to DD MM SS.SSSSS, to compare to the datasheet. It's a fairly easy calculation in the website. That's all I suggest they add for DDD MM.MMM, a search option that then converts the coords to the datasheet format for comparison.

Reporting to the NGS would be a good part of the project, if he understands that. Are there guidelines to the science fair, in terms of parental participation/kids interests? That might drive the scope of the project.

As a clarification, what I meant by the DD MM.MMM searches was adding them to the existing search capabilities. I agree that the vast amount of professional searches on the site will be DDMMSS or DD.DDDDD, so nixing those would be non-productive. As to how adding the DD MM.MMM to the datasheets would interact with the current formats, I don't think it would be an issue. I've seen reports where the DD MM.MMM coordinates are added into the report text. In addition, any station where the DD MM.MMM submitted coordinate would be useful will probably have SCALED horizontal coordinates, where (converted coordinates + rounding errors) would still be more accurate than the listed coordinates. Besides, rounding errors would probably be less than the assumed handheld GPS errors. The upper case text is a converting issue, so it's fine if you input lower case text; see the prior discussion in this forum. I don't know how much traction there is on the special character set issue, seeing as some of those characters are probably reserved for the overall format of the datasheet.

Greetings, all. In the vein of the last post, and in raising a discussion useful for the lurking NGS folks, what improvements/changes would you/we like made to the NGS website? It doesn't necessarily have to be just the datasheet section. I would like to see the following minor changes made: 1) Searches in DD MM.MMM format. I would like to be able to do all coordinate based searches in this format, to which many people with handheld GPS units default, including myself. This would be an easy fix. 2) State by state datasheet files. Right now, you can only download county by county, and then put them together yourself, which is too fine grained and unnecessary work for me to do text searches for various projects. It would be easy for the NGS website to have a script that concatenates all of a state's county files any time one of them is updated, and then replaces/updates the whole state's datasheet file. For that matter, at the largest graining I would also like to be able to download one zipped file with all 50 states' (and DC) datasheet files, and one with the other small areas/regions. For many people bandwidth is just not an issue, and a 50 MB (or 500 MB) file is just not that large. They won't be downloaded that often by folks, so the demand on the NGS webserver won't be that large. 3) Have a page with links to many of the important/useful documents. Right now, you have to know where to look to get the link to the agencies/acronyms page, and the page with descriptions of this item, that item, etc. I would like a handy 1 page listing of all of the documents/important pages, listed alphabetically. Not quite a site map, but something like that. 4) The CDROM link isn't useful anymore, especially as the page it links to says, "We don't do CDs anymore". A note at the bottom of the main page might be useful, or it might not be needed at all. 5) Station name searching. I would like a more robust station name search procedure, not just state by state and only starting at the beginning of a station's name. The Geocaching benchmark name search form is much better than the NGS's current form, but the NGS could provide a search that's better in many respects than that. 6) I have found the MAP retrieval system to be very useful, but it's oldschool, has issues and you have to adjust to its idiosyncrasies. As such, I think the map searching tool should be redone. Thoughts? Other suggestions?

My uninformed guess: One's a receiver and one's a transmitter?

The L refers to L-band, a radar/radio communications term for frequencies in the 0.4 - 1.6 GHz range (400-1600 MHz). Amplifying upon what tosborn said, and quoting Wikipedia, "The Global Positioning System carriers are in the L band, centered at 1176.45 MHz (L5), 1227.60 MHz (L2), 1381.05 MHz (L3), and 1575.42 MHz (L1) frequencies." The Wikipedia article is a very good overview of the GPS system, its history, limitations and future changes. I work in the field of radio astronomy, and important frequencies in this range (that are starting to get significant interference) are the hydrogen hyperfine transition at 1420 MHz and two OH molecular transition lines at 1665 MHz and 1667 MHz. I'm processing some Very Large Array (VLA) link OH data at the moment, which brought about this ramble.

Deb has been handling the entries from home. She goes through all of them. I second the notion of getting the new recovery entry sheet when you're done with the last one, instead of paging back. The color coding of information on the confirmation page is a good idea. I would like to have the confirmation page be uniform for whatever status you enter on the mark, FOUND, NOT FOUND, POOR, etc. An option for the STAMPING, MARK_LOGO (and others?) is that those fields are greyed out until you load a photo. Then, you get to enter them. On the other hand, I do think they should be easily entered if there's no value in the datasheet currently.

Greetings. Dave Doyle (Grand Poobah), Steve Randall (Asst. Grand Poobah) and Casey Randall (Chief Cook and Bottle-Washer) have commented that our feedback is useful. For example, submitted hand held coordinates will be handled more systematically. So, here's some feedback, that I hope other folks will chime in on. There's more information that I can provide when I make a submission for a station than what I add right now. Other folks have brought up the fact that they'd like to submit the MARK_LOGO, STAMPING and other data categories to improve each station. I would like to see those as submission options. MARK_LOGO could be a drop down menu of all of the agencies in the list, or maybe the top 20 in one drop-down menu with Other as an option. If you choose other you get another drop-down with the full list. STAMPING could be a text entry box, with a few examples and a side link as a tutorial. MARKER could be similar, as there's a number of stations that don't have a marker type listed. SP_SET might also be useful, as would SETTING. However the photos are done is cool. What the NGS does with the information is up to them, but... I would like a "Other comments" section, that would let you point out typos, duplicate reports or other errors in the current data sheet, etc.

If you have some time, you can do what I've started on the NM data. This is the tedious way, for folks with no programming skills. 1) Go to my webpage with the state by state spreadsheets. 2) Download a state, unzip, open up the spreadsheet and sort by Designation, then County, and then PID. Be sure to maximize each column, so the full names are displayed. 3) Open up a browser with two Geocaching.com/mark pages. 3) Look for two stations in the same county with the same name. Enter the PIDs into the two browser pages, and compare the coordinates/maps. The maps will be easier to spot check. I've gone through about 1/3 of NM and found AF9513 and AA9188, which I had known about before (and I think I emailed Deb; they're oddly listed in the real NGS database when I checked today)...I'll finish NM soon. For folks that can program, you can download all of the counties for a state, run them through the program that pulls the data from the datasheets into a | separated form, using the PID, DESIGNATION, coordinates, and benchmark category. Then you can program a search/print that will compare names (try just for duplicate names, and expand to more sophisticated name matching), compare counties, and then compare coordinates. If it's within an arcsecond or so, I'd print it out. This should give you mostly station/RM 1/RM 2/AZMK combinations, but it will have the duplicates in there as well. Alternatively, focusing on the coordinates is probably a better way to go. Grab the coordinates for each station and then compute those that completely overlap, or are within 1 foot (arbitrary) of each other. This would give you a much smaller group of candidates, with the pollution being RESET stations. However, that will help a bit too. You won't get the odd situations where you have the same station w/ two PIDs, one for horizontal and one for vertical, or other oddities. However, what you get should be a lot easier to handle. If you'd like a zipped form of the state by state merged datasheet files (big old text files), email me. My copies are archived as of last fall, but should be fine for this search. I think I might spend an hour or two with Matlab, working on the state by state datasheet files this weekend. I'll try to create candidate lists (much smaller than the state by state ones) for folks to work through. I suspect there will probably be 100-150 double stations (200-300 stations total) in the database. Holograph can probably do this in 5-10 minutes, but...I'll give it a whack. This is the sort of useful thing we can do for the NGS on the computer, not in the field. It won't find all of the duplicates, but will probably get over 90%. As a note, has anyone noticed that the clock at the bottom of the page (Time is now: ) and the "This message edited at:" (which is 1 hour west of Pacific Daylight Savings Time) are hopelessly out of synch with real time?

Greetings. There's a post by Green Toad in the FAQ pinned topic that probably should be moved over to the benchmarking forum. I'm not sure who moderates this forum, so...

gpsblake, Contact holograph to get your initials put on the list of benchmarkers that he tracks on his website.

I would say I take photos on 80-85% of the PIDs I find. For the other 15-20%, something prohibited me from having a camera with me (the wife had it, the memory card was full, I forgot it, etc.). I don't think it's bad to not have a photo; the issue is effort and reliability of recovery. Taking and posting a photo is going that last 10% to make a solid recovery. However, I would also rely upon a report that didn't have photos, but had updated coordinates, or a better to-reach, or more information about the disk's situation. I guess I look at three things when rating the reliability of someone else's report: 1) Their professional history (personal or organization) What do I know about that person? When I'm going after a station, and someone's logged a station already on Geocaching, I usually case their logging history. How professional are they? If it's an NGS log, what feel have I gotten for that particular agency, or person if I know enough about their initials? 2) Quality of log I'm much more willing to believe a log that is fully fleshed out, with updated coordinates on a SCALED station, better to reach, generally more text, etc., compared to a fellow nearby who has logged half a dozen stations with: :P:P:P:) FTF!!!!!!!! 3) Photos Good photos can make up for a bad or mediocre log, and are sometimes better than a good log. All of these factors come together in my mind when looking at someone's log. Generally, it's hard to lie and claim stations you haven't found, because someone else will eventually come by and check your work. What makes a good log in my mind? My below guidelines are nothing new in this forum, but describe how I try to log. 1) "I found the station in good condition, as described." This means that everything checked out ok, the station was there, it was solid, and nothing had changed since the last time. 2) If the station has SCALED horizontal coordinates, you note that the coordinates are ok, or you provide better hand-held. I try to do this for all of my SCALED finds, except where reception is lousy (under-bridge pier stations, for example) or the few times I forget. 3) If the to-reach or the station condition has changed, describe how it changed, give an accurate to-reach that will place the person at the station, and note how accurate your distances are. 4) Take 2 photos, 1 from 6 inches or so above the disk and the other from eye level 5-15 feet (whatever's appropriate) feet away, as the approach shot. If a log has all of these, it's rock-solid. If there's enough data provided, it's still rock solid.

Sadler Hunts, I agree with rhelt100 that your disk is probably not in the NGS database, or in its copy here at Geocaching.com/mark . Do you have a larger photo, or know the agency that's stamped on the disk? This might help the search. If the disk you found is not in the database, you can probably add it to Waymarking. Also, take a look at the FAQ, topic #2.