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ucmike

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Posts posted by ucmike

  1. great series, great hike. we did it in about 7 hours, with a lunch stop and a casual pace.

     

    note that there aren't trail maps at the parking lot. bring the cache pages which have the trail directions on them and mark the car.

     

    enjoy, we did.

  2. it gives the bomb squads something to do.

     

    they over react, they under react......

     

    i was the manager of a lake club for several years. i came in one morning to find that someone had destroyed our life guard stands with homemade bombs full of carpenters chalk. i called the local police, who responded promptly....3 hours later....and didn't even make a report. that "bomber" blew the crap out of the neighborhood for a few weeks and never got caught.

  3. my first thought is that bomb squads probably love the opportunity to use their gear and gadgets and probably can't wait for the chance to blow up a package. basically, if they find something they think they should-or can-use their gear on, they will.

     

    it doesn't help that there are people out there who believe that every box is a bomb, and there's a terrorist around every corner. life goes on, i will hide my caches carefully and go on with life.

  4. i use a magellan 320 and it works just fine for caching, travelling and work. ( i use it to find and survey wireless sites). it has plenty of functionality, but i have none of the gadgets that go with it. i enter points manually and it only takes a few seconds. i like its durability and reliabilty. it seems to work fine in the woods and is in your price range-maybe less if you shop around. i wouldn't go crazy buying a unit with all the bells and whistles unless you want the "gadgetness" of it. i saw the yellow etrex at target for $99 this week.

  5. as has been said, your cell phone is working from the network of land based transmitters transmitting a different type of signal. the frequency and several other factors would account for the cell signal getting into buildings, etc. most newer cell sites have a gps receiver mounted near the transmitters, i think it uses the gps signal to triangulate for 911 capable phones.

  6. i saw that too, and my first thought went along the "orwell" lines. my other thought was that we are now fitting our children with the same technology that is used for keeping house arrested felons in line. it also struck me that anyone who would go to the extremes to harm or kidnap a kid wouldn't think twice about doing whatever neccesary to get the thing off a kid.

     

    i think this is more of the growing paranoia brewing in america everyday. a boogie man in every woods, a terrorist on every flight and a child molestor in every park, glass caches are waiting to dice apart children, laser pointers will blind airline pilots.

     

    we seem to think that this kind of 24hr surveillance will protect kids. what it does (IMO) is create a state of mind where children believe that the dangers are lurking everywhere, and that "outside" is not a safe place. it might also give kids the impression that they are 100%protected by this lit bit of tech, which is not true either. i think you're better served teaching your kids some common sense, and doing the things that parents used to do, instead of strapping some batteries to your kid and hoping your pc will protect him/her.

  7. the gps will work in the park, but i know it will have a hard time at street level due to limited views of the sky in much of midtown and downtown. they work great on the rooftops though.

  8. my magellan freaked out during last winter and showed me miles from a nearby cache and had me at an elevation of 10,000+ feet...not likely here in central NJ. it insisted on that for several minutes until i gave up on the cache. it came back after being turned off for a while. never did it again

  9. i have a magellan 320 (no waas) my partner has a 330 (waas). we use them for surveying antenna sites for cell and microwave antennas. occassionlly we do surveys together and have never seen a difference in readings from the two units. every time they came up with identical coords.

    also, my magellan has gotten me to within 5' of posted coords from this site and also from coords from wireless sites.

     

    non-scientific, but i don't see where waas is any great advantage right now.

  10. my first and only tb was dropped in a cache in key west while we were on vacation and never moved or resurfaced. the cache has a list of missing bugs, but after i put mine there a whole slew of them have come and gone with no problems.

     

    i checked the cache page tonight and it shows my bug still there, with 0 miles.

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