JSWilson64

Thanks! I had completely missed that "advanced search" link -- it's pretty nondescript.

Is there a way to pull up travel bugs that have gone >= X miles, or have >= X logs, that type of thing? Anything more advanced than perusing the gallery? Thanks.

I'm doing almost the same thing. Got a blue Legend, 60csx on the way. Now I gotta find a FAQ about recommended accessories...

AWESOME! Those are perfect! Thanks a million!

I tried it - unless there's a newer version, mine doesn't do "sphere" without some trickery. I was never good at art, though...

Maybe a 3-d Venn diagram - is there such a thing? Well, I'm off on another obsessive search...

Thanks for the pointer - there's a good "lesson" on how GPS works and a diagram of satellites swarming around Earth. I'll keep looking... -edit- and I found one: How Stuff Works It's not the best depiction, but then, it's better than what I could come up with on my own...

Anyone got a link to a diagram of the Intersection of Spheres part of GPS location? I'd like to show a group of school kids how this stuff works. I tried in Sketchup, but I couldn't get past the part where I couldn't figure out how to make a sphere. And anyway, I'd probably get bogged down in stuff like trying to make it accurate to scale, and other nit-picks...

When my son got it pretty bad last year, our doc recommended Domeboro astringent compresses. It works very well to dry it up while the rash is "weeping." We just tear an old towel into strips, soak in the solution, and apply to the rash areas. Topical prescription steroid cream works well to stop the itching, too. Best remedy is prevention - scrub with soap and water as soon as you return from the woods. Not later that evening - when you walk in the door. Get the sap/oil off as soon as you can to mitigate the effects. The rash typically lasts 2 weeks, so it's best to stop it or reduce your exposure before it starts. And don't "miss" anywhere, or you'll be sorry. Like if it's on your knee, and you forget to scrub the back of the knee, it can be painful for 7-10 days, and the inflammation can drain down to your ankle and make it hurt, too. Don't ask me how I know that...

Seems like this might be a good "sticky" item.

How 'bout a GPSr that'll let me use maps from whatever vendor I choose, in whatever format I choose (vector, raster, map or sat /aerial photo). A GPSr with a "if it's geoencoded, it's usable" attitude. I despise proprietary-ness in any device, from I/O protocol, to connectors, to batteries, you name it.

Mine always points where the cache is supposed to be. Then my kid points to the cache, somewhere I'm not looking.

My Legend is fine after about 18 months light-to-medium duty usage. Other than not locking on so well in tree cover, I've had no problems (and that's not so much a "problem" as a "feature"). If smacking it cures it, there's probably something loose inside. Whether it's a spring in the battery compartment, or something further in, hard to say. You might try with a bit of gentle force, expanding the springy bits that contact the ends of the batteries. Try new batteries. Try a different brand of batteries. Try wedging something in there to make darn sure the batteries aren't shifting around. I use the Energizer Lithiums in my Legend, work great. If you have one that always points the same direction, why not send it back? Garmin's customer service gets high marks here (never had to try it myself). The worst that can happen is that you're out postage after finding out it's going to cost too much to fix. With any luck, you'll have a fixed GPSr on it's way back to you.

Thanks for the reply - yes, I had seen some stuff about proprietary formulae. And I gather it's a "confidence interval" of sorts - "Accurate to 10 feet" means that there's an x% probability that the coord you want is within 10 feet of the GPSr. I was hoping someone had run some calcs - I'm a bit stuck going from the abstract stuff I've found so far to the concrete, "how do you crunch the numbers" part. Still searching, and listening to answers!

Wonder how much memory those sat photos take up...

In my continuing saga to try and make a Palm Tungsten E2 & Globalsat BT-359 (SiRF Star III) Bluetooth GPSr work together, I bought DeLorme Street Atlas USA Handheld on ebay for about 10 bucks. So far, it seems to put me on the map where I think I am on the world - so far so good. If all I wanted to know was "show me where I am on this map" it would be fine. But geocaching requires a bit more precision than that, especially when approaching the cache coords. The GPS info in Street Atlas leaves a lot to be desired. I found Cetus GPS which is free and gives a somewhat better view of what satellites I'm seeing, and strength of signal. Neither gives an Estimated Position Error, however. (edit- I should note that Street Atlas will display EPE for some GPS units, but apparently mine isn't one of them) I know it's calculated from DOP (Dilution of Precision) values, maybe from the satellite Signal to Noise ratios, but that's about all I know. I know I can set up a terminal connection to my GPS and capture the NMEA data coming out of it, and query it with NMEA and SiRF commands. But after I get that info I don't know where to go next. Anybody here ever calculate an EPE???? -edit- OR, is there a good rule of thumb for HDOP values? I know "smaller is better" but what's the range of these values, and what qualifies as "small"??

This has probably been hashed out a zillion times, but here's the deal. In addition to my Etrex Legend, I'm playing with a Palm Tungsten E2 and a Bluetooth SirfStar III GPSr. So far I've been unimpressed with what I've found to work with it. I can see satellite signal strength, and position, lat/lon. One program has tracklogs, but you can't view them on the handheld. Some lower-cost mapping programs I've tried are disappointing, because they use raster maps, or you have to find and geoencode your own maps, or stuff like that. I'm about to try DeLorme Street Atlas USA. But I have little confidence that I'll like that. IMO, I'd like to see at least the functionality I get with my Legend - Satellite strength, viewable tracklogs, zoomable vector map with realtime positioning, waypoint management, stuff like that. If Street Atlas USA does it all, I might be happy, but I'm not holding my breath. So, I'm considering taking an open-source GPS toolkit and writing some code to make a Geocaching-friendly GPS interface. The vector maps will be the tricky part, but as my momma says, I'll jump off that bridge when I get to it. But what features do Geocachers feel they can't "live without" ?? What features would make you want to use a PDA GPS app, and what features would keep you from using it if they were absent?

Not exactly what you're looking for, but... With a Bluetooth GPS receiver, there are several utilities that will display a "star map" of satellites, and/or a bar graph of signal strength, your lat/long, heading, and speed. And, of course, with the right mapping software, your position on the face of the world.

How 'bout a laptop with a 17 inch widescreen display and a USB or Bluetooth GPS. That's got a big, color screen, with a rechargeable battery to boot! Or one of those Trimble surveying units that'll take her within 6 inches of the coordinates (too bad the cache place used a 1st Gen GPS unit and the cache is 20 yards from the listed coords). It'll probably cost more than the laptop... Lotsa folks around here like the 60CSx, but I haven't tried one myself...

Not September: Placed 5 August. Picked up 6 August. But I'll try to be patient. I placed it in Hawaii because we started it with a goal to go to each state. Even printed up a little "passport" for it to take along. Figured HI would be one of the more difficult places to get to. If he hasn't placed it within 90 days of pickup, I think I'll e-mail and ask if he'd like me to send him a SASE to send it back to me. Otherwise, I'll just keep my fingers crossed.

My first-ever TB, Nice Going Einstein!, went to Hawaii with us on vacation. We "dipped" it in a cache near home, and it was first released "in the wild" in Hawaii on 5 August. On 6 August, it was picked up. Sometime in the first week of September, I e-mailed Einstein's captor. He replied "Sorry, going to drop this weekend (around 10 Sept.) in CA). We even exchanged a couple of e-mails - not just a single message each. So far, he's still got Einstein. I e-mailed about a week ago, no reply. Is that it? Is that all I can do? Should I offer to send a big padded SASE so he can send Einstein home? Or just write it off and start a new TB with the dupe tag?

If you're looking for Palm OS, I think Palm still makes Palm OS Treo units (they have the "p" suffix). They also make Windows CE versions now. Here's one site with some Palm powered smartphones that a Google search pulled up. If you want to use GPS on a phone, Trimble has a program. Here is a list of phones it supports.

Here is a page with info on Pocket PC mapping programs.

In the interest of overloading you with information here's another solution. If you use Easy GPS, you can open a bunch of gpx or loc files, they show up as tabs. Simply make a new one, copy and paste the info from the other tabs into that one, and upload that tab's info. Sounds more complicated than it is. That's how I do it when I'm just browsing the "find a cache" page and find several I want to save, and don't want to set up a query.

I'm not sure if he's dead, but he's been MIA for a while: Nice Going Einstein. What really chaps me is that I contacted the cacher who has the bug in September, and he said he was going to put it out that weekend. That's been a month, now. I e-mailed the cacher again last week, and didn't get a reply. This was my first TB, and one that my kid's Gifted & Talented class was going to follow, so they can see how it works before they make their own TB. Part of me wants to harass him daily until he responds, look up his ISP info, that sort of thing. I can feel my BP rising as I type. Better to let it go... Nice to know you, Einstein. Maybe I'll clone you with the dupe tag...