Kodak's4

But it makes sense to understand the laws involved. I'd suggest calling Jay Cooke's supervisor, or the head of Minnesota state parks, whichever is easier to locate. Politely explain the situation, and ask them to SPECIFY exactly which law is being violated. Here in WA state, if something is illegal, you should be able to point to a specific paragraph in the Revised Code of Washington and see the law mentioned. Lots of people post signs in restaurants saying "Shirt and shoes required by law" when there is no such law. I'd make a fair wager that there is no law that makes placing caches in Minnesota parks illegal. Call their bluff. If they don't come through with the citation that makes it clear, call up your elected representatives and bend their ear for a couple of hours, and get them to lean on Jay Cooke. If nothing else, call up the Parks people and complain about Jay Cooke being hostile. But get a citation for the law. I'll bet there isn't one, or if there is, it's one of those "Any act which is deemed inappropriate by Parks staff is illegal" variety. Then the question is "How much political pressure can you bring to bear". Write letters to the editors of ALL the local papers, quoting Mr. Cooke's log entry verbatim. Mention Mr. Cooke by name. Mention his supervisor by name. Give the direct dial phone numbers of both of them, in the letter, and encourage people to call both of them and express their own views on the issue. Heck, post that info here. I'd be happy to call them and express my opinion.

But it makes sense to understand the laws involved. I'd suggest calling Jay Cooke's supervisor, or the head of Minnesota state parks, whichever is easier to locate. Politely explain the situation, and ask them to SPECIFY exactly which law is being violated. Here in WA state, if something is illegal, you should be able to point to a specific paragraph in the Revised Code of Washington and see the law mentioned. Lots of people post signs in restaurants saying "Shirt and shoes required by law" when there is no such law. I'd make a fair wager that there is no law that makes placing caches in Minnesota parks illegal. Call their bluff. If they don't come through with the citation that makes it clear, call up your elected representatives and bend their ear for a couple of hours, and get them to lean on Jay Cooke. If nothing else, call up the Parks people and complain about Jay Cooke being hostile. But get a citation for the law. I'll bet there isn't one, or if there is, it's one of those "Any act which is deemed inappropriate by Parks staff is illegal" variety. Then the question is "How much political pressure can you bring to bear". Write letters to the editors of ALL the local papers, quoting Mr. Cooke's log entry verbatim. Mention Mr. Cooke by name. Mention his supervisor by name. Give the direct dial phone numbers of both of them, in the letter, and encourage people to call both of them and express their own views on the issue. Heck, post that info here. I'd be happy to call them and express my opinion.

Question 1: scratches on face of Etrex - you can polish scratches out of plastic. There are rubbing compounds to polish plastic available at a plastics supply place (look under plastics in the yellow pages) or you can use toothpaste (seriously, toothpaste is a very mild abrasive). Question 2: Is it safe to go out geocaching alone near Snoqualmie, WA? Well, there's no such thing as 'no risk' but I'd say that Snoqualmie is likely to be one of the safer places. I live not far from Snoqualmie in Woodinville, and I go out alone often. I know quite a few other geocachers who would not hesistate to go out alone in the area around Snoqualmie. It's a small rural community. Your biggest risk is probably being hurt in a traffic accident, followed closely by getting hurt while hiking. The risk of violent crime is pretty small, if that's what you're asking. Anyway, there are boatloads of cachers in this area. If you post a request to the NW forum and mention specific dates, you should be able to easily find a geocacher who knows the area who would be happy to join up with you to find the caches in the Snoqualmie area! -Paul

quote:Originally posted by The Leprechauns:What I would LOVE to hunt instead would be an offset cache whose published coordinates took me to a point in an open clearing, where there would be good GPS reception, then I would be told (either in the published clues or at that spot) to proceed on a compass bearing of XXX degrees, for a distance of YYY yards, straight into a jungle thicket at the bottom of a ravine. There's nothing stopping you from doing this with a normal cache hidden in a spot with lousy reception. Set your GPSR to take you to the waypoint. You should be able to get a distance and a bearing to the waypoint from wherever you currently are. Go to the clearing where there's reception, note down the distance and bearing indicated by the GPSR. Now put away the GPSR, get out the compass, shoot a bearing, and walk the appropriate distance. I've used this to good effect several times.

I've used both CA super-glues and hot-melt glue. Both failed. Epoxy seems to work the best.

Encouraged by this thread I went out yesterday to do some checking at three different NGS horizontal first order control benchmarks close to my home. I was using a Garmin GPS V. Rather to my surprise, I could get a WAAS lock at all three locations. Two of the locations involved standing either in the middle of the roadway or else on a very narrow shoulder to position the GPSR over the benchmark. Despite this, I managed to compare WAAS and no WAAS fixes at all three benchmarks. 1. The big surprise was that, in all three locations, the errors for ALL fixes, both WAAS and non-WAAS, was much smaller than I expected. In all cases the difference between the listed coordinates for the benchmark and the indicated position for the GPS was less than 12 feet. 2. WAAS seems to help. In no case was the WAAS fix worse than the non-WAAS fix. In one instance, the WAAS fix showed a difference of less than two feet when the previous non-WAAS fix showed a distance of some 12 feet. 3. The non-WAAS fix seemed to wander around quite a lot; the WAAS fix seemed to be more stable. That is, I was standing on the benchmark with the unit trying to navigate to the benchmark. In non-WAAS mode, the spot the unit was indicating was 'ground zero' would wander around me, first north of me, then west, etc. In WAAS mode, it seemed that the readings would show ground zero in one spot, and that spot would be in one place and move around relatively little. One observation I made was that the points I picked to make these observations all have a clear view of the sky, and I had a good constellation available. The result is that even the non-WAAS fixes were generated using from seven to 11 satellites. It would be very interesting to know how WAAS affects the results when you're down to just four satellites. One thing that surprised me was that the unit seemed to be indicating that it was using the WAAS satellite in generating the fix. I was under the impression that the geosynch WAAS sats provided only correction data but perhaps that's not so. Anyone know for sure?

quote:Originally posted by headmj:If you want to use a benchmark for a test, look for a first or second order horizontal control. First order controls are accurate to 1:100000 and second order controls are accurate to 1:50000. You can search for benchmarks on the NGS website and specify what kind of control you are looking for http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/datasheet.html. If you are looking on the benchmark pages here triangulation stations are always good horizontal markers. I mention horizontal as opposed to vertical controls because the accuracy on vertical controls is not as good. Thanks, this was the key I needed. I've identified several nearby horizontal controls and I'll go scope them out today to select one that has a good view of the sky (fortunately the one that is closest to my home seems most promising!) -Paul

I had to go to a friend's house on Lake Washington for a meeting. His house has a totally unobstructed view to the east, south,and west. I took the GPS V out onto the end of his dock and let it get a lock, then turned on WAAS. It cycled through the WAAS satellites, finally getting a lock on BOTH. After about 5 minutes, I had 'd's in all the signal strength bars, although I didn't see the estimated error drop at all. Before turning on WAAS and getting the WAAS fix, I watched the coordinates, which were drifting around in the usual way. With the WAAS enabled and d's in the bars, the position did not seem to drift at all. Getting a WAAS fix is much faster now. I presume that once the unit got a lock on the two WAAS sats it downloads some ephemeris that lets it know which ones to look for; it no longer seems to cycle through searching. I would like to perform the 'take measurements at a NGS marker' experiments but I don't understand the different classes of benchmarks. Some are labelled GPS; I presume these were assigned lat and long using GPS observations. Some were clearly surveyed. How do I locate a nearby benchmark that was surveyed and is known to have a small error, and which has a good view of the sky? -Paul

quote:Originally posted by EraSeek:My Accuracy did not drop though. I know one thing though, WAAS does not always help. Bad geometery is bad geometery, and sometimes the ionoshephere cannot be improved upon so corrections may be useless. Are you saying that the accuracy didn't improve, or are you saying that the GPSR estimate of the position error didn't decrease? The two are not the same thing. It's likely that they're correlated but based on experiments I did at a NGS Benchmark with my GPS III, it is not perfect. I have certainly seen times when the error estimate was low but the position was several meters farther off the correct cooridinates than other times when the error estimate was quite large. Most of the 'experiments' that folks have done to test whether WAAS improves accuracy seem to be poorly designed. NGS benchmarks provide a good *known* location to perform experiments, and it would seem to me that repeated observations at different times of day, different conditions, etc. would pretty conclusively tell us whether WAAS helps or not. I'd have done such an experiment myself but didn't have a WAAS capable receiver until Friday. But it's on my list, now.

One possibility for why a unit might draw greater power with WAAS enabled than with it disabled might be computational burden. In the manual for my GPS V, Garmin state that enabling WAAS may make computation intensive tasks (such as auto-routing) run considerably slower. That suggests that with WAAS disabled, a unit might have considerable more compute power than needed, and might have an opportunity to save power by idling the CPU when no computation needs be done. With WAAS enabled, the computations may suck up this otherwise idle time, so that the processor is drawing more power. Is this the real reason? I have no idea, this is all conjecture. Re: must have WAAS enabled for a long period of time. I just went outside, turned on my GPS V, and let it get a fix. Then I enabled WAAS. It spent the next ten minutes unsuccessfully searching for satellites 33-51, which I presume are the WAAS satellites. It took a considerable amount of time to run through all of them. It appears to me that at least in that location (the end of my driveway) the time from enabling WAAS to getting a WAAS augmented fix might be quite long.

quote:Originally posted by Eric O'Connor: quote:Originally posted by Kodak's4:Do you suppose that by posting it here, you've just spoiled the surprise for some people, and thus spoiled their fun? You're being a tad harsh. Nobody made you click on that link, since people read these forums from thousands of miles away, it makes sense to share ideas. Be careful what you click on if you're going to be upset over receiving information. You seem to be missing the point. 1. The owner of the cache is actively engaged in trying to make sure that the surprise isn't spoiled, by deleting spoiler photos and spoiler log entries. 2. Posting a spoiler here in the discussion forum is a spoiler the cache owner can't delete. 3. It's possible to share ideas without including spoilers. Note that the post by the 6 Pack Rats and the post I responded to are both discussing the same cache. The 6 Pack Rats shared the idea without including a spoiler. 4. My not reading the posts does not prevent people other than me from having the surprise spoiled. On the other hand, sharing the idea without including spoilers DOES. Since the cache owner is apparently taking steps to keep spoilers from being bandied about (by deleting spoiler logs and photos), it seems like ordinary politeness to not post spoilers here. What do you think?

quote:Originally posted by Eric O'Connor: quote:Originally posted by Kodak's4:Do you suppose that by posting it here, you've just spoiled the surprise for some people, and thus spoiled their fun? You're being a tad harsh. Nobody made you click on that link, since people read these forums from thousands of miles away, it makes sense to share ideas. Be careful what you click on if you're going to be upset over receiving information. You seem to be missing the point. 1. The owner of the cache is actively engaged in trying to make sure that the surprise isn't spoiled, by deleting spoiler photos and spoiler log entries. 2. Posting a spoiler here in the discussion forum is a spoiler the cache owner can't delete. 3. It's possible to share ideas without including spoilers. Note that the post by the 6 Pack Rats and the post I responded to are both discussing the same cache. The 6 Pack Rats shared the idea without including a spoiler. 4. My not reading the posts does not prevent people other than me from having the surprise spoiled. On the other hand, sharing the idea without including spoilers DOES. Since the cache owner is apparently taking steps to keep spoilers from being bandied about (by deleting spoiler logs and photos), it seems like ordinary politeness to not post spoilers here. What do you think?

quote:Originally posted by leatherman: No pictures though the owner deletes them if you post them. Why do you think the owner does that? Do you suppose it's because the FUN of that particular cache is the surprise value of not knowing what to expect before you start out? Do you suppose that the cache owner is trying to preserve that aspect of the cache, by deleting spoilers? Do you suppose that by posting it here, you've just spoiled the surprise for some people, and thus spoiled their fun?

quote:Originally posted by leatherman: No pictures though the owner deletes them if you post them. Why do you think the owner does that? Do you suppose it's because the FUN of that particular cache is the surprise value of not knowing what to expect before you start out? Do you suppose that the cache owner is trying to preserve that aspect of the cache, by deleting spoilers? Do you suppose that by posting it here, you've just spoiled the surprise for some people, and thus spoiled their fun?

I also have the startac 7868. It does fine except: 1. I break the antenna about every six months or so. Fortunately replacements are cheap. 2. The battery lasts nearly forever in digital mode, but (like all other phones) lasts only about a day in analog mode. Analog mode just sucks. -Paul

I've got a Leki trekking pole (like this) which get's me sneers from most people who see it. It's shiny, etc. I like it a lot. When walking along logs, crossing log bridges, stepping across streams on stones, and threading your way on dodgy trails, it does a lot to improve your stability. It's rigid and strong enough to help you scramble up steep inclines. It takes the strain off my not so great knee on downhill stretches. It doesn't way much, and it collapses so I can put it away. Mine has a spring-loaded shock absorbing feature, which is useless and makes noise as you walk (ick). Don't get one of those. But being able to adjust the length is a key feature that a wooden staff doesn't have. Dome shaped baskets will keep the end from sinking deep into the mud, but will not snag on brush the way snowflake ski pole baskets will. And the pole is handy for searching in dense underbrush, too.

quote:Originally posted by Cache Magnet:That's what happens when your finger accidently double clicks on the "post now" button That's right. If you double click on the 'post now' button, it changes the spelling of 'orifice' to 'oriface'

quote:Originally posted by Cache Magnet:That's what happens when your finger accidently double clicks on the "post now" button That's right. If you double click on the 'post now' button, it changes the spelling of 'orifice' to 'oriface'

I guess you all live where no prickly things grow. Out here in Western WA, the main impediment to reaching many caches is blackberry vines or other thorny stuff (e.g. Devil's Club). I got a few surprises when stinging nettle season started, too. Now I carry a pair of leather gardening gloves.

I know it's hard to be of two minds when your only mind is hardly working, but I'm of two minds on micro-caches. On the one hand, I'm of the view that it's possible to hide a black film can in the forest so that no one, not even the person who hid it, can find it. On the other hand, I've recently found a series of microcaches hidden by CameraThyme. They use a very small container (about .5" diameter by 1.25" long) that contains only a rolled up log. And you know what? I love'em! The extremely small size means that the hider can get pretty creative. Good hints make it not too frustrating. They're brightly colored, so the searcher has half a chance. Check out the picture of the container on this cache:Just Log It! 98003

quote:Originally posted by Bear & Ting: My wife and I were talking about this on the way home the other night and wondered if Cache-owners marked their boxes. If your cache container (ammo box) is not marked, what is to stop someone from "finding it", "taking it", and "reusing it as thier own"? There are some stolen and plundered caches out there. I've read some logs where authorities have picked them up, or that were considered abandoned, but these are few. What is stopping someone from snatching an ammo box and changing the contents and rehiding it, or even selling it on Ebay. The only things stopping someone from taking a cache that I've hidden are: 1) they have to find it to take it, and 2) common decency. I've had one cache stolen. It's a bummer but that's the breaks. I refuse to spend time and energy worrying about it. There's some fraction of humans who are worthless scum, and if they find a cache, they're going to take it and trash it regardless of how it's marked. Marking the cache wouldn't help. If someone steals one of my ammo cans, why, they could just peel the sticker off, or they could paint over any markings. I paint ammo cans before I use'em, and the process takes about five minutes and about 50 cents worth of paint (and I buy expensive paint).

I've seen several posts about what people felt were overly long approval times. If we're gonna ding those volunteer admins when they take too long, we've gotta praise them when they're amazingly fast. I just had a cache approved in about 30 minutes. Way to go!

A GPS receiver and a stopwatch can be used to accurately measure the height of a tall building. To do it, go to the top of the building. Reset the stopwatch. Reach out and gently drop the GPS receiver over the side of the building, so that it will fall unobstructed all the way to the ground. As you drop the GPSR, start the stopwatch. Watch the GPSR fall, and when it strikes the ground, stop the stopwatch. The altitude of the building can be computed using the formula H = 16*t*t, where the time t is measured in seconds, and the height H is given in feet. Fans of the metric system can use H = 4.9 * t * t, with t in seconds and H in meters. Heavy, compact GPSRs (e.g. GPS V) will have a higher ballistic coefficient and thus will give more accurate results than a bulky, light unit like a GPSMAP 76s or an etrex.

I'll second the recommendation for Marmot Precip jacket and pants. I like mine a lot.

quote:Originally posted by niskibum:Name one church that you have attended that didn't collect tithing or pass around a collection plate. I've attended services at quite a few Quaker meetings. I've never seen a collection plate passed at one. Generally speaking you'd be hard pressed to figure out how to contribute without asking someone.