Pasha

I know most people have been disappointed in how well most of these combination phone/PDA/GPS type devices work, but some of the things shown at CeBIT over the last week were pretty interesting and are starting to get me excited about the future. Check out this new Siemens phone, among others. Right now I use four different devices on a daily basis (phone w/camera, PDA, GPSr, iPod) but that at least makes an attempt at combining all four. Think about what we'll be seeing 5 years from now.

Well... unless you're talking about 100 miles between waypoints, the error from using the law of sines would be well within the EPE of the GPSr. A significant elevation change between waypoints would also mess up the results. That brings up an interesting question - do products such as Mapsource correct for earth curvature when doing waypoint projection and such? I assume they do since they're based on lat/long. Practically speaking, I wouldn't bother with the math when faced with trying to find the cache at WP3; I'd just do what the OP did and fire up Mapsource or use the reciprocal bearing method. With most cache-related problems like this, the waypoints are within walking distance so the error introduced likely wouldn't matter much, but for longer distances... But he asked for a more precise method, so here we are.

Can't help with question 1. For 2, there's a couple ways to limit your GPSr transfer to a certain number; the easiest to do manually is to just get your list in order, and to use the From and To boxes at the top of the "Send Waypoints to GPS" dialog. To do it as part of a macro, you can get your list sorted how you want, and then use the USERFLAG command to set flags on the first 200 waypoints, and then the FILTER command to use the "user flag = set" filter to only show those 200. For 3, if you open the Edit Waypoint Properties for your waypoint, down towards the bottom of the dialog is a "Lock" checkbox. Check that, and this waypoint will not be overwritten by any data from a GPX import, regardless of your import settings. Hope that helps.

Webscouter types faster than me. To flesh out what he said - you've got the right idea- where they intersect is the place you want to be. To get it exactly, what you need to do is figure out the distance between your first two waypoints as well as the exact angle that the bearings you're given make to the line between the first two waypoints. Then you can use the Law of Sines to figure out the distances between the first two waypoints and the third waypoint. The BBC has a nice page on the Law of Sines. Converting those numbers to lat/long coordinates is another thing entirely, I guess.

In the very same cache, I found: 1) a stinky used McDonalds burger wrapper, wrapped around the top half of a broken Flick (from Bug's Life) McToy. 2) a package of handmade stationery with beautifully done artwork and calligraphy - watercolor paintings of flowers and such. Threw away the one, didn't take the other.

At that price, I should've bought more than I did, but how many days a week can I get away with wearing the same shirt?

I'll leave that to the owner, but basically you have to find the whole submarine. I wish I lived on the other coast so I could try it myself. When I first saw the picture, I thought it was the Foxtrot that's currently residing on Seattle's waterfront (this site is from its previous residence in Long Beach.)

Well done FrodoB - I've followed you at several caches lately. Give me a year or two...

So I have GSAK installed on my little USB drive now. It works fine on this machine, but I'm wondering if I'll have to actually "install" it on my other machines so that the various file associations and libraries get put in the right place? Or is all that stuff in the installed folder (in this case, on the USB drive) so that I can just run it from the drive and have everything where it's supposed to be in relation to the .exe already... Can't wait to get to work tomorrow to test it out. First time I've felt that way about going to work in months. Thanks Clyde.

OK, I thought this was kinda weird before, when we were talking about waterproofing. But this...

Nifty. Subscribed.

Ya. I don't have it on my work machine, so I was going from memory - thanks for clarifying. I plan on trying the "install on my USB keychain" thing tonight and see how that works out; there've been a couple of occasions where I wanted to update something to Cachemate but didn't have my laptop here... as my work machine has an IR port I'll be able to be truly mobile.

Yes - all those warning labels on everything now, keeping people from doing the most idiotic things, are there because someone did do those idiotic things. I would hope most people just use common sense about things like this. I'm certainly not going to complain about a vintage lighter as a trade item, though a half-full Bic would get dumped in the CITO bag.

No, not a beta version of GSAK - the USB support in the current version is at the beta level. May work, may not, but I'm sure Clyde would appreciate feedback either way.

Right-click on the cache, choose Toggle Available/Unavailable status.

No, no, don't mind me. Just being flippant.

I may need something stronger than popcorn now that religion discussion is complementing the previously entertaining micro discussion.

Was your GPS plugged directly into a USB port, or was it using a Serial-to-USB adapter? If the former, GSAK includes beta support for it, but you have to enable it specifically in the GPS Setup dialog (GPS menu, Setup) by clicking the Use USB checkbox. I've never tried this myself as I don't have USB GPSr. If you were using a Serial-to-USB adapter, be sure the drivers for it are installed correctly and that you've chosen a COM port for it to use/appear as. You can usually do this in Computer Management/Device Manager/Ports (COM & LPT)/ by finding your adapter listed and double-clicking to get to its properties page, then going to the Port Settings tab. Hope that helps!

There's several good tutorials linked here; the one that got me going with Cachemate and GSAK was this one.

I LOVEHATE micros.

Many "hardened" Palms and other PDAs, such as those specially made for surveyors and whoever (like the new Durateq), are waterproof, in the same way that my Legend is waterproof. We bought several earlier model hardened Symbol Palms at a previous employer; my toilet-dropping episode that managed to get water under the waterproof screen and fault the whole waterproof machine is probably still talked about at that office. If you trust your waterproofing, don't buy the bag.

That's extremely cool. I've lived in Port Orchard most of my life and have still found things that I didn't know about after being led there by a cache. It's great to see that Issaquah has recognized the historical resource all the caches can represent.

Very cool, I'll have to pick one up. Is it the King County Journal or something else? Edit: I guess not. Looks like they update the site with new stories monthly or so.