Old Bill

As a relative Newb, (32 found) I was already starting to understand the rift between micros and regulars before I found this thread. But that kinda changed a little when I found this one. There is only 2~3 places other than the hiding place, and that leaves one to really think about the options. Confounding the search was a DNF on the log prior. But I spent some time, and eventually "something" caught me eye, and there it was. It was a container I hadn't seen before, and placed to make it just a bit of a thinker's challenge, but not impossible like a fake leaf or pinecone. I hope to find, and maybe even place, a lot more like this one. However, having said all that, I'll bet that once the landscaping is in, the DNF's roll right in.

Well, after picking up a Zire 21 on closeout special, I got the GC premium membership and Cachemate. (already had GSAK) I spent a few minutes playing with the whole thing, and Whammo! I've got 189 caches within 10 miles of my home and work on the GPSr and all the data on the Zire 21. While stopping for a cache on the way in to work today didn't result in a find, it sure is nice having all that info in the palm of your hand when you need it. No more "I'll head home and check the logs", or "What is this short message in my GPS about the hint?"

Well crap. I guess I'll just have to be happy with paperless caching! I was looking forward to using my GPS and PDA like a set of nunchucks tho'....

Well, now I'm in for it. Went to OfficeMax to get a black ink cartridge because ours was dead from printing out cachepages. Cartridge was something like $20, and while I was browsing, I found a Zire 21 on close out $69 brand new. Sure, it's not all the bells and whistles, but if I can save the hassle of paper and buying ink all too often, then I'll be a happy camper. Just have to see what else it'll do so I can easier justify it to Mrs. Old Bill..... And be warned, once I gain some familiarity with the device, I'll be bumming info from you guys on how to connect it to the GPSr so I don't have to keep all the waypoints in the GPSr. Cache you guys later!

Ok, I'm one of the dissenters....I bought my 76c about a month ago, and am very happy with it in all respects. Fast sat lock, smooth autorouting, doesn't boomerang me nearly as bad as my old Maggie 315, and I LOVE that I have my entire home state of AZ in topo and street maps in the thing, with 50 meg left over. I researched before buying, and this whole size issue confused me from the start. Mine fits my hand comfortably, but then I wear a mens' large glove. I could see where if you have a "small" or "medium" hand, then MAYBE you might find the 76c awkward, but otherwise, it appears (to me anyway...) that the size thing is purely aesthetics. There is the topic that the screen "appears smaller" because of the larger case, but I was comparing apples (76c) to oranges (old 315), and I really liked the new apples I bought! It's all relative, and for me, the 76c appears to be a great blend of usability for the car, around town, vacation, and geocaching. It seems the size issue gets a lot of play, but remember, it's not the size, it's how you use it that counts!

Hey Clyde, Just wanted you to know that I got my copy of GSAK registered finally. Well worth every penny! I also wanted to put my vote in for a large catalog of waypoint symols so we can manage all our waypoints, even the non-geocache ones. Thanks for a great product!

Don't know if you mean US or England, but I've been getting WAAS locks in Arizona with no troubles.

The road is drivable all the way. It is the old "Cherry Road" that leads to the town of, well, Cherry. It's been there for some time. Many of the descriptions earlier in the 1900's mention this road. We probably parked within 30 feet of the location. The "go-to" description appears to be "follow-able", but there are a lot of variables that could have changed between then and now. The biggest challenge is indeed the vegetation. It is thick, coarse, and plenty of stickers! Approaching off-road from the south would not be very likely because of this. The other thing that sticks in my mind is the "20 feet south of a cattle guard. That puts it right on/near the edge of a roadway cutout IF the cattle guard is indeed in the original place. This cut out may have been pushed back further from the road, as the shoulder there is obviously man made. This would have eliminated the mark. At any rate, this one is not going to be really high up on my list. There's plenty of other ones nearby that I want to explore first. Thanks for the advise!

Hee-hee You need to come out to Arizona and look for this. Bring your chainsaw and heavy gloves. If it's there, yer gonna loose some blood finding it! Seriously though, I believe that SaguaroAstro has it right. The PID linked to above is the one he is referring to. IMHO, it warrants a question mark to at least let people know it is going to be a challenge. A real challenge. Now, the other one SaguaroAstro is referring to may very well be findable, as it's in some not so dense scrub. A better search of the area is not out of the question, and while a witness post wasn't easily visible, we didn't cover a lot of ground looking for it due to fading daylight. We may yet get back up there and search again.

National Geographic's Topo! 4.0 supports USB. It's $40, and also includes 3D views and reasonably recent street overlays. I've transfered data from/to my 76C via USB with this software.

Hopefully a 4-40. 6-40 is an odd duck except to old school machinists, gun smiths, and large corporations looking to sock it to the consumers for hard-to-find-except-from-our-company-so-you'll-pay-us-whatever-we-want type of parts.

Well now, that 'splains it, don't it? Thanks for the input.

Sorry about the link...Should have known. The disc says... (Top) U.S. Coast & Goedetic Survey and State Survey (Center) Station No. CB10 ---|--- Elevation (Bottom) Feet 1955 I was thinking that because it was the USC&GS, it would be in there. I know that there a lot of state/county/city ones that won't have any listing in the DB. Oh well.....

I've done a search for this mark at (near) coordinates Lat: 29.484548 Lon: -082.566963 Location is Archer, Fla. http://www.earlycj5.com/forums/attachment....ntid=3869&stc=1 (Let me know if the image doesn't work...) There is a clear view of the designation, but I can't seem to find it. If anyone can explain what I'm doing wrong, please let me know so I can figger it out next time. TIA!

My wife gave it to me for a birthday present, it was $40. She said that they had some $20, but they even admitted that they weren't as good. Regardless, the $40 one is wonderful, and I still consider it a bargain considering I dropped over $500 on the GPS and software.....

Any recommendations for where to find old maps? Mostly 30's and 40's in the Southern part of AZ is what I'm finding. Thanks for the advice....

Got a Gilsson antenna for my Garmin GPSMAP76c. I thought I had Good reception before while driving around, but man, WHAT A DIFFERENCE!!! It is sheer joy being able to drive around and get 10 FULL bars PLUS one or even both of the WAAS 'lites. I'm getting something around ±10 ft, and even ±6ft a good part of the time while driving! I even was getting 2/3rd a bar or better for most of the 'lites while under a gas station canopy! Count me in for a positive review!

Hello all, and Happy July 4th! I've got quite a wish list of old benchmarks that I'd like to go looking for, and this leads me to some questions.... First, how far off can one expect the coordinates to be for benchmarks from the 1850's? 1900's? 1935?, etc, etc. In particular, some of the areas I'll be searching may very likely have none of the features listed in the "get to" directions, so I'll be probably having to canvas an area based on the given coordinates to find it. Second, can anyone suggest a good way to cover an area looking for these older marks? Things like how to search, what to look for, tools/gadgets/gizmos to have etc, etc, would be very helpful. And a bonus question...Is there a website that explains (in layman's terms) exactly what we are seeing when we find a "triangluation station", a "reference mark", an "azimuth mark", and so on, and how they interact with one another, etc? Or possibly, would any of the pros here care to give a quick guide to these things? I apologize if this has been covered before, I couldn't find specific answers to these. Links are as appreciated as answers. Thanks! This forum is great!

If your targets are out in the middle of nowhere, you can use National Geographic's Topo! to plot waypoints. I recently sent a whole bunch of them at once via GSAK. What was interesting was that a good potion of those followed old RR track lines. It's very useful to see where the waypoints are in relation to major roads, towns, etc. Really though, with software, the possiblities are endless. HTH

You may already know this, Thad, so forgive me if I'm suggesting the obvious. The NGS .dat files are just text files, so if you do a global search and replace in any text editor (such as Notepad) you could probably replace all those "UNK" with something of your choice Thanks Embra, Yeah, I had figgered so much. But with well over 600 waypoints to edit, I think I'll just edit them in GSAK as I come across them. I'd rather be finding good candidates than sifting and replacing data....

Thanks for all the help & advise. What I've figgered out is that the trouble crops up after running the .dat file through BMGPX. BMGPX takes the "UNK" and converts it into today's date. I'd use GSAK to replace this data with "nothing", but for my purposes, it isn't very helpful. I'd also use DSWin to get the last found date, maybe a bit more useful, but I'm really interested in getting as close to the actual placed date as possible. Ideally, the "placed" date would be the date actually place, or barring that, then the earliest date reported on the mark. But I'm not a programmer, so I'll either have to manually "fix" the .dat file before running it through BMGPX or manually edit the waypoint in GSAK. I'll probably do the latter, because I can at least do the ones near my location and not have to do them all at once. Thanks again!

Hello All, By chance, has anyone written a macro or something that will open up a waypoint(s) and show it in NG's Topo!? Website someone could point me to? Thanks!

Thanks Clyde, You are right, when I open the .dat file with my text editor, it shows pretty much as it would from the NGS website. But, the BMGPX converted files automatically place the current date anywhere it runs across a "UNK" date. Becuase I'm not too savvy on software, macros, and such, my only options are to either go through the raw data and replace each "UNK" with a more appropriate date, or to simply manually adjust the date with GSAK's waypoint editor. I'm thinking the latter is a better choice, because I can simply adjust the ones that I'll be near, and not worry about the others. Might also make for a good time killer if I'm ever up for that.... Anyways, thanks so very much for taking the time to reply. I'm really enjoying the product, and I will be registering as soon as funds are available to do so. Great job Clyde! Thad

Thanks Team Armadillo, but that thread is what prompted me to set it all up a few days ago! I've edited my first post since I *think* I've figured out what's going on. If you can offer up any more, I'd be glad to try it! Thanks, Thad

Hello all, I just install GSAK a few days ago, and have been adding in the benchmarks for the various couties near me. I have run into a problem though. Some of the marks show a "placed" date of the day I imported them into GSAK, when there is no corresponding date in the description. For example, ET0136 has a date of "UNK" in the Monument description, and another date of 1935, but it come up in GSAK as "placed" 7/2/2005. A good portion of the marks in the 5 counties I've loaded have this trouble.... The issue appears to be this..... Whenever the Monument date is listed as "UNK", it trips the program into setting today's date. I'd really like to have the ability to sort by the date on the datasheet. Any thoughts besides manually setting them? It would be REALLY cool to have the program just skip over the "UNK" part to the next date. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thad AKA Old Bill (Bill is the Jeep)