Little-Acorn

Well, thank you Peter and IV, I think your were right about the WGS84 data. I checked the Lowrance, and it seemed to be set to something else, hard to tell what. I found the WGS84 entry and selected it. Suddenly the waypoint that was a quarter mile from the house where it shuold have been, had different coordinates. And the house coordingates suddenly matched up very closely with the correct waypoint coordinates. And there was much rejoicing! Whee, that Lowrance took me to Big Bear, Neverland, and Sequoia National Park while set the wrong way. I guess being a quarter mile off is OK when you're trying to find something the size of an airport or a lake. (Actually, it isn't, but what's past is past). Now we'll see if the Lowrance can find something the size of an ammo box or film container! The Garmin Emap has already proven its mettle. The Lowrance gets one more chance.

My sons Guardsman and Turtlemaster went geocaching today, using the Garmin Emap that has already led to to within a foot of two different caches - a VERY accurate GPS! I went to meet them some hours later, at one of the waypoints they were checking out. I brought the Lowrance Armap 100 that I had used while flying, which had gotten me to many airports from sometimes hundreds of miles away. I searched high and low (literally, bushwhacking up and down a very brushy 300-foot cliff and fording a muddy creek, couldn't find hide nor hair of them, despite calling LOUDLY over and over. Went back home and called Guardsman on his cell phone. They wondered where I was, they'd been right there waiting, they said. We agreed to meet at a certain house which was one of the waypoints, I met them there and we lived happily ever after. But I started wondering why we hadn't hooked up on the first try. Got the Garmin Emap he'd been using, and went to the waypoint in question. It corresponded exactly to the house that the clues had said would be there. Checked the Lowrance Airmap 100, and it said I was 1/4 mile away from that waypoint! The Garmin put me on top of a tall ridge that had many newly-built houses on it. The lowrance had made me go to the edge of the ridge the houses were on, and stare down a BIG cliff down into a canyon, where the Lowrance said the waypoint was! When I was looking for them the first time, I had gone to many places among thse houses, bushwhacked up and down the cliff, all with no result. FInally drove back three miles, found a way to drive along the bottom of the cliffParked, walked to a creek and crossed it (brush over my head and mud up to my knees, I needed new shoes anyway), found the Lowrance's version of this waypoint in the middle of a plowed field 1/4 mile away from the house and down in the canyon. So now my two GPS's disagree with each other. And no, I did NOT have the coordinates mis-typed as I once had with another geocaching trip. I carefully checked and both were exactly correct. My money is on the Garmin Emap. That GPS has led me directly to two different caches, and when it said I was at their exact location, I found them les than two feet away. Its accuracy is amazing, especially considering that it is not WAAS-enabled. IMHO the Lowrance Airmap 100 is useless for geocaching. If you spen hours looking under every bush and in every tree within a 50-foot radius of where it says the cache is, only to find the cache was 1/4 mile away, you will appreciate how I feel right about now. Especially when it wasn't a cache you were looking for, but your own kids. Anyone want to buy a Lowrance GPS cheap? >:-p

My older Garmin Emap (not WAAS-enabled) has led me to within a foot of the location of the first two caches I tried to find. Was I just lucky? Who needs WAAS?