Wrong quordinates

[wallypop]

I am fairly new to geocaching and have so far had very good success. My Garmin 60csx has walked up to within feet of most caches.

 

With all the talk of some gpsr like the legend HCX and colorado tracking incorrectly, My question is if a cache is placed with one of these malfunfioning units will it's location be wrong, making it difficult or impossible for someone to find.

[+RonFisk]

I am fairly new to geocaching and have so far had very good success. My Garmin 60csx has walked up to within feet of most caches.

 

With all the talk of some gpsr like the legend HCX and colorado tracking incorrectly, My question is if a cache is placed with one of these malfunfioning units will it's location be wrong, making it difficult or impossible for someone to find.

Yes! It will. I've never had a problem with either my Colorado or my 60CSx. Actually I'm starting to prefer the Colorado over the 60 for geocaching. I've found it to be very accurate and those cache descriptions, hints and past logs are sure nice to have.

The Colorado is still experiencing growing pains, but hopefully most of those will be corrected with a firmware update. Way past due, however...

[+SimbaJamey]

Yup.

 

I had 2 early DNFs with a Vista HCx that I went back and found with a 60Csx no problemo.

I was told by a fellow cacher that those 2 were both placed using a 60.

Went back to do one again with a friend after I got my Colorado...and DNFed it again

 

[jmundinger]

I am fairly new to geocaching and have so far had very good success. My Garmin 60csx has walked up to within feet of most caches.

 

With all the talk of some gpsr like the legend HCX and colorado tracking incorrectly, My question is if a cache is placed with one of these malfunfioning units will it's location be wrong, making it difficult or impossible for someone to find.

 

If the person hiding the cache and the person hunting the cache use their gpsr's correctly, I think the differences between the model used by the hider and the model used by the hunter has little to do with with dnf. We are playing with commercial grade equipment. Even under ideal conditions, there is a probable error associated with every data point recorded by every gpsr. And,when conditions are less than perfect (which would be the usual situation) additional and unpredictable error is introduced. And, as a foot note, if you want to compare the "accuracy" of two units, hunt up a benchmark or other fixed location. A comparison of "accuracy" based on proximity to a geocache is meaningless because the location of the geocache is just the best guess of the hider, without any indication of the confidence interval around that guess.

[+twolpert]

That's right. The problem here has nothing to with the model used by the cache owner vs. the model used by the cache seeker. The real issue here is that both the HCx and the Colorado share the Mediatek chipset and chipset firmware (v2.60). There is apparently a problem which, in certain circumstances, causes the HCx and the Colorado to report position incorrectly. Sometimes the error can be sizable -- up to 600 or 700 feet. Obviously, this is eanough to cause a DNF if you're hunting a cache. And it would clearly cause problems if you hid a cache and recorded an incorrect location.

 

But it's all related to a problem with these specific units -- not to mysterious incompatibilities among units of various types.