kite

quote:Originally posted by Jeremy:I have to say, the subject line for this topic was deceiptive. Okay, since I'm desperately looking for a topic that matches what I need to say, I'll use this one, for its subject line (if not original content) is accurate! I can't post new topics to the forums. I get an error that says "The page you requested is not available" when I submit my new topic post. If I re-submit, I'm told that I can't do so because my submission is identical to the last one.. except the last one doesn't show up! I tried at both work and home, IE and Netscape, Mac and PC, with both my accounts (Kite and Hawkeye, and just Kite. I'm sorry to have two accounts, but there's no way to delete the second one, so I figured I might as well use it to do this test.) I can't figure out whether anyone else can post new topics, either; I don't *see* any new ones since yesterday, but I could be missing them.

We've already got a yellow eTrex, but I'm curious about models with mapping capability. How much map can one get in 8MB or 24MB of memory? What would it take to hold, say, the entirety of San Diego county? I'd care about having as much detail as possible -- the smallest streets, topo maps. Come to that, how well can one even see a topo map, on a GPS screen? Can you load both street and topo information, and if you do, do you get to select which to display at any given time? I know topo maps are often indifferent when it comes to keeping up with street changes. The higher-end eTrex models apparently have finer resolution on the same size screen as the yellow; is the print then very, very tiny?

quote:Originally posted by ChrisfromMS: quote:Originally posted by Renegade Knight:It's a real estate funcion. Location, Location, Location. Urban is more frequent. Close to the interstate gets more visits from travelers, etc. Remote is much less likely. Located by other caches improves the odds. Maybe this is Skydiver type math. Then why hasn't this one been found frequently: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?ID=67101 Because it's a 4 terrain! That's part of 'location,' methinks. There's by the freeway, and then there's by the freeway.

I think they were getting hard to control; you don't want EVERY bleedin' plaque along the highway to be a virtual cache, yet how do you judge which ones are appropriate, interesting enough, etc? If you can hide a micro near an interesting historical thing, people get to see it -- you could even use the marker as part of a clue for a multicache, just to make sure they read it -- and still incorporate the fun of the hunt. That's what I don't like about virtuals -- you can spot the plaque from hundreds of feet away. If it were an obscure little plaque that I had to hunt for, I'd be a lot more keen on it. My personal opinion, which others can and often do disagree with, is that geocaching is fundamentally about finding things that other people hid. It naturally branches off into finding things that other people simply find interesting, which is okay -- it's a big internet, room for plenty of games -- but I'd like to see it on a different count than physical caches.

Some people put out coins as simple trade items, though. If you want your coin to stay in circulation, it might be best to stick it in a baggie with brief instructions. I'd love to have a coin to keep, if I found one and the owner didn't care.

I think including the exact coordinates on the plaque would be an excellent idea. ±

Really, don't worry about it. You only see them when you're logged in, because you have the power to edit/delete/encrypt your own logs. The site is a bit funny about logging in and out, so you may see odd things persist after logging out, but those options are not visible to other random people viewing the site, or people logged in under another account. Nobody else will be editing/deleting/encrypting your logs (except the cache owner, who has the power to encrypt or delete any log on his/her own cache, but this rarely happens).

quote:Originally posted by quills:physicals are normal caches with goodies hidden in them. Micros usually only have a log of some kind to sign no prizes to change usually. Hope this helps. Aw, you can usually get tiny trade items in a micro. A micro can be an Altoids mint tin, a 35mm film canister, or something of that sort. Small coins, tiny polished rocks, or itty bitty rubber frogs generally fit . I always leave something, unless it would be impossible to get the container closed.

Logging in once a month? Sounds like heaven.

I thought Dan's stats site wasn't being maintained any longer. It's always been slightly inaccurate. GC.com possesses exact find counts for everybody; it would be fun to see accurate, real time stats. I don't see geocaching as competitive -- we'll certainly never catch those with a thousand finds -- but I still find it interesting to see what others have done. I'd be curious to know what the average number of finds is, stuff like that. How many hundreds of people have more than us? I love statistics. I'm not obsessed enough to even attempt to try to correct our listing on the stats site, though. For one thing, I can never get enough pages to load properly...

A few people seem to be implying that the yellow eTrex doesn't get reception as good as some other models. I didn't think that was the case; is this anecdotal evidence, or is there reason to believe more expensive units are any better at getting and keeping a signal? I've only got yellow eTrex experience to go by, but it works just fine. With Hawkeye, I've found 25 caches, and never had a performance problem -- in trees, in canyons, whatever. I've only lost signal by putting it in my pocket. I've heard rumors that Magellan's units are better than Garmin's under tree cover, but I doubt anyone's conducted a study on it, and I've never encountered a problem, so if you're on a budget the yellow eTrex is a perfectly good solution. It's a good little GPSr. We use it when hiking and camping -- it saves tracks, knows sunrise/sunset times, and usually claims an accuracy of around 20ft. We're very happy with it. The translucent cases on the more expensive Garmins are pretty sexy, but I'm nowhere near tempted to upgrade.

I mean, can you have a 1/5 or a 5/1 or a 1.5/4.5? If the overall difficulty is so hard, it must have sometime to due with the terrain - right? And if the terrain is terribly difficult, it can't be an easy find, eh? Check out "First Contact" for an easy terrain but high difficulty rating. There are two reasons for the high difficulty -- one is that a puzzle is involved, the other is that the locations are so exposed that it's hard to actually fetch the caches without being conspicuous. Terrain is never a factor, though (we walked all of perhaps fifty feet, all on concrete). An extremely clever or well-camouflaged hide on easy terrain is another instance where I'd expect the two ratings to differ significantly, and that's information I like to have. I'm more than willing to take on a difficult to find cache, but I'm not up to major hiking or climbing. One of the first caches we did was on difficult terrain (an almost nonexistent path, very steep and rocky, but luckily it was short. And, okay, I'm a wuss -- I think it actually only rated a 2 or so) but the cache was actually sitting out in plain sight a few feet off the trail (nobody but a cacher would've reached that point anyway, and you had to look in the right direction, but there was absolutely no camouflage). In most instances, the difficulty/terrain are somewhat intertwined, and they often do become blurred, whether for the reasons you describe or because people don't interpret the two scores correctly (like in one cache we investigated where the description said 'we added another star to the difficulty because of the thousand-foot elevation gain'...). Generally, I pay a lot of attention to terrain ratings, but only use difficulty ratings as a sort of hint as to how long I expect the hunt to take once we reach the coordinates. I pay more attention to the description than to either rating, but the ratings help when I'm looking at a long list and picking a few caches to investigate.