Richard & Beth

quote:Originally posted by Pharisee:Are ' UK forum moderators' and 'UK cache approvers' always they same people? Umm... I've not worded that very well... I'll try again If you're a Forum Moderator are you automatically a Cache Approver (or vice versa) ? No. I was a forum moderator for a long time before I started approving caches. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Ben Pid: Yes and the worst experience ever was when Dan left the torches at home!!!! You do it with torches? I thought you searched only by the light of the backlight on your GPS!

quote:Originally posted by The Merman:This is a very neat idea http://shop.Groundspeak.com/productDetail.cfm?CategoryID=4&ProductID=24# Mark, you just have to get some of these in stock at G:UK. In time for the HCC would be good, although I don't hold out too much hope of that. As Chris and Maria have said, similar stones have been used for their microcache at the Epping Forest meet and some others. The one we have was sold as a 'spare key' stones, and was inherited from a previous owner of the house paranoid about locking themselves out. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Gaz, Suni, Jack & Kashi:I just hope it's more accurate than the basemap on my Vista, I walked across the River Severn last week & I couldn't even see it! The basemap on the vista is dire, however you will find that Europe Roads and Rec includes waterways and rivers, and should have the river in about the right place. p-d, we have both a yellow e-trex, and a vista. I don't have too much of a problem with clutter on the vista, which I believe is the same display as a legend, however in light of the above comment, I would factor in the cost of getting Mapsource Roads and Rec for the maps to be anything like useful. Having said that I still tend to use the compass page a lot more than the maps when searching for a cache on foot, the maps are only really useful for road navigation. Richard

Garmin are very protective over the format for Mapsource maps, as obviously they have a good revenue stream selling Mapsource products to load onto their GPS's. As far as I am aware there is only one third party who has been allowed to produce maps in Mapsource format, a Garmin Norwegian distributor who are producing Norwegian topographic maps. (If you can read Norwegian, take a look here. ) Interestingly, the last time I e-mailed Garmin over availability of Topo for Canada and/or UK, where I got the usual 'ongoing negotiation with the OS' reply. However the person who replied highlighted Norway as a situation where they were open to third parties doing compatible maps as it was a situation where they considered it not economically viable to produce the maps themselves. Richard

quote:Originally posted by MarcB: Ahh yes finally someone else with the god of phones- the 3650 ! I'm pretty chuffed with it Yes, I only got mine at the weekend. Persuaded my project manager that he wanted to update to one too, although he's only just starting to realise that he's basically got a pretty powerful PDA/Smartphone for £80. Considering the amount they were charging for similar phones even a few months ago it's pretty impressive. I was considering getting a copy of Opera, guess I'll have to see if someone has a comparison of the two. The other wish list applications for it would be if TomTom port their Nokia 9210 version of Citymaps and Route Planner over to it, especially as they are now doing a Bluetooth GPS. Richard

Interesting point, we reached our second anniversary last week. I have to agree that the early caches seem to be more memorable, for example I can still pretty clearly remember View from Coombe Hill, and Pit Near Penn, the first two we did. Most likely I think it is that after you get more experienced as a cacher there probably isn't the same thrill at finding the cache that there was when you started. Also one ammo box or tupperware box hidden under a log tends to be much the same as any other unless there is some particular twist that makes it stand out. Richard Richard

Tony, I wasn't aware of the limitations of the Java Midlets, which I guess are the only way to go in order to reach a large range of users. I've come across a thing called miniGPS for the Symbian/Nokia Series 60 phones which pulls off Cell ID's, but that is specifically targeted at a specific platform. I guess as smartphones become more prevelant it might be possible to do something with cell ID's, but it's then into the age old problems of different platforms - two different Symbian platforms already, plus Microsoft and Palm producing stuff. I was just going for the ultimate wish list. Richard

Works fine on my Nokia 3650, certainly beats trying to browse around the Geocaching.com site over the GPRS link on a small screen. Being able to get a cache description and clue on the phone is great. One question - how long does it keep cache data locally? The reason I ask thinking about how it would cope with changes to locations, details etc. Couple of wish list items here, it would be great if it could search from your current location, although I know that will be pretty complicated as you'd have to map cell ID's onto lat/lon locations. On a somewhat more doable level it would be nice to be able to have a local my target geocaches folder (or something along those lines), where you could download the cache details and keep them separate from the location based searches. I could then select caches I was going to do on a particular caching trip and have all the details to hand without having to print off pages of cache details on the off chance. Anyway, thanks for your hard work, a really excellent tool. Richard

Do you have anything else locking up the serial port? I have had problems before because the PC backup software for my PDA keeps a permanent lock on the serial port and Mapsource can't get a look in. Richard

Unfortunately work is what funds the expensive toys and petrol costs that we need to go Geocaching. Richard

Typical! Anyway I have heard that the Garmin unit presents the GPS to the OS in a different way from current GPS expansions, so software will need to be adapted to cope. Perhaps that is what the person from Garmin was getting at in saying that it is incompatible. Richard

On a related note, at the weekend I e-mailed Garmin Cartography with a selection of questions including whether Fugawi would work on the upcoming Garmin iQue 3600, as if it would it seems like the ideal solution. The answer I got was that currently it wouldn't work, as the new unit is PalmOS 5, however they did say Fugawi were 'working on it'. Hopefully if Fugawi can get the problems sorted the Garmin would make a neat solution to having moving OS maps on a PDA. Richard

I'll have a dig around and see if I can find the article, but I do remember reading that the Garmin error estimate is regarded as optimistic. So if the error is reading at 10m, in the same way as the location that it is reading could be a lot closer to the correct position, there is a possibility that the position being shown is more than 10m out. Richard

It's not strictly a travel bug, as he was released before Groundspeak introduced the travel bug, but I think Tim and June's Gulliver Bear probably wins the award for the greatest distance travelled. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Pharisee: but rivers and railway tracks do sometimes seem to be a bit out. John Age and treachery will always triumph over youth and ability. Certainly found that today Going Wild On The Moor near Basingstoke. The Vista showed the River Loddon as a single channel, which it wasn't. Thankfully I had a Landranger OS map for the area with me, so we didn't get wet feet. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Gunther:How much did Motorola pay you for this clever product placement Richard Nothing. Could equally well have mentioned the Benefonica GSM model, or the Garmin. However Motorola is a lot more well known, and is not such a specialist bit of equipment. Richard

I don't really see that a commercial organisation needs to use this site? We are now starting to see mobile phones with built in GPS - take a look at the feature list for the Motorola A830. The technology is there for a company to provide the location of some 'hidden treasure' on their own website, or by SMS or MMS. The phone could then navigate to the location using the inbuilt GPS, and it even provides a camera to take a picture when you get there. How different is this from what we call Geocaching? Richard

If you are talking about the default basemap that comes with the eTrex, it is dire. I have had a similar experience in Micheldever, where the place I used to work came up on the wrong side of the railway line. The problem is that all the Garmin maps are vector based, the basemap being with less resolution, so many features are represented by a long straight line. In my experience the Garmin Roads and Rec maps are considerably better as the vector data is of higher resolution. For any navigation with GPS maps they are well worth the money when compared to the basemap. Having said that there are still errors, for example although my office was in the right place on Roads and Rec, Micheldever Station isn't... Richard

quote:Originally posted by Teasel:Memory map's still quite an immature product. It's only recently that they introduced seamless tiling. So, hopefully, they've just had more important development work than 3-D flythroughs, rather than it being a licensing restriction. Indeed. The OS has a reputation for being difficult over licensing though... quote:There's still quite a lot of unfriendliness in their basic user interface, but hopefully once they've got that sorted out, they'll then start giving us lots of nice fun toys like 3D flythroughs! http://www.geocacheuk.com - resources for the UK Geocaching community. Looking at some of the stuff that the US topo mapping products do there is a lot of scope for fun toys in Memory Map if they are allowed to use the data. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Teasel: Nice! Now if only we could persuade MemoryMap to provide details of their file formats, so that we could extract a set of (x,y,z,colour) points, we could make our own. Can't see it happening, though http://www.geocacheuk.com - resources for the UK Geocaching community. Since the dataset that Memory Map is using has some sort of height data in order to provide the route profiles, I assume that not taking it to a 3-D representation is not caused by lack of data. Perhaps the terms of the OS licensing agreement stop them doing it? Richard

quote:Originally posted by hammack:There is a WWII bunker there, so I assumed that there was some sort of public access to the bunker. There is no right of access to privately owned buildings, even if they are of historic interest. I would think that even if there was a footpath close by then that wouldn't automatically mean you had access to the bunker either. For example, the fact that a public footpath goes through a farmyard doesn't give you the right to wander around inside the farm buildings. With reference to a national organisation making a difference, in this case I don't think it is relevant. It seems like the cache has been placed on private property without permission, and from the reaction of the landowner he is not keen to have people there, so the cache should be removed. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Daisy&me:I noticed this afternnon that in the list of who's logged in to the fora Richard & Beth were in _bold_ type which presumably means they are still moderators too. The trouble with the world today is that everyone makes sweeping generalisations. No, I can confirm that although we are coming up in bold type, we haven't got access to any of the admin/moderation functions. From past experience the display of moderators and whether they are able to do anything are separate, for example Tim and June had access to admin functions long before the captions changed, and in the same way Monz has been listed as an admin for a long while after Moss T returned to the job. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Kouros:Congratulations, and all the best! Can't help but start thinking... which ingenius cacher will be the first to propose via Geocaching? Perhaps leaving the ring as the solitary cache prize? ------ An it harm none, do what ye will http://www.scubaboard.com/images/smilies/soapbox.gif Already been done, more than once... See here and here. Richard

The OS flybys can be found here. Richard