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Rotareneg

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Everything posted by Rotareneg

  1. And don't send the NGS reports on intersection stations: http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=264093
  2. That sense wire is attached to a small board soldered directly to the battery and cable terminals on the back half of the case, which then connects to the main board through a small ribbon cable. The board had quite a bit of stuff on it, along with an aerogel supercapacitor, so I presume it peformed various power related functions. Interestingly enough, there was a small disk glued onto the back of the case with a little hole under it. I can only assume it was supposed to be a vent hole similar to the ones Garmin uses, with a hydrophobic membrane over a hole to equalize pressure without letting water in. However, the hole either didn't connect to the outside, or had the most minute pin-hole opening imaginable as I couldn't see it until I used a syringe to force water at considerable pressure into it which seemed to force a still quite small pin-hole opening in the outside of the case. If you want to check your own unit, it's on the right edge of the cable mounting surface on the back, on the line separating the polished and matte plastic, about 7 mm from the plastic rail for the connector that projects up from the case. As to why I didn't like the PN-40? I'd say the main reason was that I've had it freeze up too many times, sometimes requiring me to format the internal memory because a track log or something else got corrupted. Another big issue I had was with the cable: instead of using simple and reliable leaf spring contacts like on an old Garmin eTrex, they went with these horrible little spring-loaded pins which wore out and wouldn't reliably connect without having to wiggle the connector around. The display visibility, while acceptable with the user interface and vector maps, could be extremely dark and muddy with some raster images (aerial photos for example.) The X-Map software you have to use to create custom raster images (and which costs at least $100 beyond the purchase of the GPS itself) was astonishingly slow when viewing and converting images to their own proprietary format. You had no option but to use Delorme's maps as there are no free/open maps available like there are for Garmin units. A minor thing I didn't like was the way it always did some averaging of the reported position when the unit wasn't moving instead of showing the actual random drift; I'd rather there have been an option to turn that on or off. I can't say current Garmin units are any better as I don't have any, but compared to my old 60Cx or even older eTrex Legend it just felt a bit unreliable and vaguely unpleasant to use.
  3. I took apart my Delorme PN-40 GPS which I've grown to hate for various reasons, so here's what's inside: (to view full size, click on the images to go the the Flickr page and then right click on the photo and choose original) Here's the RF front end: Here's the surface mounted barometer:
  4. Don't forget: they've got three categories of destroyed, X being surface mark only, Y being both surface and underground, and Z meaning presumed destroyed.
  5. The only one I've had marked as destroyed by the NGS was KG0654. I submitted photos along with a recovery report describing the condition of the mark and they reported it as destroyed.
  6. He's not saying the GPS is more accurate under trees than in the open, he's saying that turning on GLONASS reception helps keep the accuracy closer to normal when under trees which are partially blocking the GPS signals as opposed being out in the open. If you've got a clear view of the sky, I personally wouldn't use both at the same time, but in a city or under trees all the extra satellites visible can really help. As far as WAAS goes, if I were in a forested area where keeping a solid track on the WAAS signals is going to be unlikely I might turn it off, perhaps freeing up one channel depending on how the particular receiver works, but otherwise I always leave it on.
  7. They seem updating the datasheets every other month or something. A mark I reported on April 20th ( http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/ds_mark.prl?PidBox=KG0143 ) just showed up in the last few days. The HH2 coordinates and photos showed up not long after I submitted them with DSWorld however.
  8. Photos wider than 800 pixels are apparently still being resized down to 800 wide after the NGS receives them. They will change the captions occasionally too, I have one where they added "(DESTROYED)" to the end of the caption on a photo of an obviously destroyed mark. Maybe someone felt the yellow background on yours might be harder to read or something. I've actually had some where they changed the contrast of the photos some time after they had already shown up on the data sheet which I thought was a tad odd.
  9. The recoveries I submitted back in early January have just now shown up this month. The regular web recovery form was down at the time so I used DSWorld, not sure if that caused the delay or what. Also, the photos I submitted via DSWorld showed up pretty quick on all the recoveries, it was just the actual recovery log (and updated coordinates for a couple) that took so long. Maybe they got lost (or I didn't submit them right) and Dave or someone else just crawled the reports here and posted 'em into the NGS database. Also, does getting a mark "recovered" as destroyed count as a recovery for the statistics here? That was the first I've found that was out-right destroyed with the disk still around to provide evidence.
  10. The photos I uploaded on the 9th are still small, but at least all the older ones are back to full size. Update -- They're all full sized now, might have just been my browser cache needing to be refreshed or something.
  11. I noticed the web recovery page acting up too, so I used DSWorld to submit some recoveries for the first time (I've used it to submit photos and coordinates, but not actual recovery reports.) Hopefully they go through fine.
  12. They're just the right size for viewing on a cell phone, so what's the problem? I'm sure at this point everyone has dumped their giant clunky laptops and even more enormous desktops and replaced them with a smart phone, right?
  13. Probably the easiest way, especially if you don't have a GPS and couldn't quite make out the label on the disk, is to use Google Earth with a Survey marker overlay.
  14. http://www.geocachin...aspx?PID=GA3599
  15. Rotareneg

    Gallery

    Considering how they've buried the benchmarking link on the front page, I'm surprised they even have a benchmark photo gallery like that anymore. Did you try to contact Groundspeak, futile as the attempt might be?
  16. I get a better sense of satisfaction when finding a mark by the description, but that's not exactly the point behind the marks themselves. If a mark has scaled coordinates I submit new ones, either from GPS or aerial photography if in a GPS unfriendly location. I've never submitted coordinates for azimuth marks however, I just include their location in the recovery text.
  17. One I found back on August 12 (KG0754: Geocaching, NGS) still hasn't shown up, although I suppose it's possible I forgot to actually submit a recovery. The photos I submitted with DSWorld did show up however. I wonder how much labor is involved on their end handling recovery reports?
  18. They already have some really handy aerial photography available through EarthExplorer that, in my area, go back to 1951. They're great for trying to find references to old railroad tracks that have been pulled out, among other things. They're not orthorectified so they won't overlay exactly over a regular map, but they're good enough at small scales.
  19. Don't forget that just because there's no recovery report doesn't mean they haven't been used. Here's one I found just the other day: KG0754. It has no recoveries since being placed in 1950 and yet someone has placed a much more modern fiberglass witness post next to it.
  20. Having discovered that the new area that I have moved to apparently turns into a writhing mass of ticks during the summer, I probably won't be finding many marks for a while. :insert emoticon of a tick being pulled off a smiley face here:
  21. Many USGS benchmarks are not in the database, the Benchmark Hunting FAQ explains here: http://www.geocaching.com/mark/#usgs That particular mark isn't in the Geocaching or NGS database, so if you want to log it you'll have to do so at Waymarking.
  22. I'm surprised nobody mentioned this one: http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/TOOLS/Inv_Fwd/Inv_Fwd.html There's a downloadable program and a web version.
  23. I had one where it was under about 6" of sandy dirt. Gave up the first time and then dug it out on the second visit: And another where the surface mark was missing and the underground mark was at the bottom of a hole:
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