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Benchmarking on a vacation or business trip


Black Dog Trackers

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Recently my wife and I went on a driving vacation. We put hundreds of miles on the rental car, most of the time not around big cities. I wanted to pick up a couple of stations here and there as we went.

 

I did very little benchmarking during the trip (you can rest assured as to my sanity icon_smile.gif), but wanted to share a couple of observations on it, since vacation season is coming up for most people, and maybe others have a better way of finding benchmarks while traveling.

 

We brought along a laptop and the CD of counties for the GPS receiver. Also, we had a list of local phone numbers for the ISP.

 

I didn't have a bunch of stations to try before the trip started, because I knew we would have to re-arrange which roads we'd take because of snow and other reasons, so I would try to look up some at motel rooms for use the next day.

 

One thing I'd do was to pick very small towns along the way. With a small town, you can pick up a benchmark or two without worrying about going far out of your way. I would use the USGS' The Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) to get the town's coordinates. The GNIS also can find place like Red Rock Canyon or Rocky Top. Then I'd put the coordinates into geocaching's benchmark search page and begin to look for likely candidates.

 

I had no printer with me, and didn't want to write down all the verbal information, so I would save each benchmark page on the computer as a .htm file. These files could be accessed with a browser software while the other person drove without connecting to the internet. The only difference is that you can't get the little map.

 

I guess one could say that it might be good to load up the GPS with coordinates, but without the verbal finding directions with reference landmarks, this could prove to be a vast waste of time, wandering vainly near benchmarks. One thing that would alleviate this situation is to select only horizontal control marks (the 'adjusted's). Currently, I think there's no easy way to do this selection, until we have a benchmarking schema and programs that use it. DSWIN will write a file with this field, and it can be sorted, but how to get that into some program that writes to the GPS?

 

Another thing is to try to determine what types of witness posts are being used on a particular stretch of highway. Presumably all marks in the same series will be likely to use the same type of witness post (if any). This would be a way to find other stations along the drive, at least for the passenger icon_smile.gif .

 

Any other thoughts on this?

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I USE MY DELORME ATLAS AND GAZETTEER FOR EACH STATE THAT I VISIT.IT HAS THE GRIDS ON IT AND THE TOWNS.EASY ONES CAN BE MARKED WHEN OBSERVED,THEN LOGGED WHEN YOU GET BACK THIS WAY YOU HAVE A REFERENCE AND ITS MARKED ON YOUR MAP.THE OTHERS LIKE DISCS YOU CAN DO PRE-SEARCH OF AREAS THAT ARE XXX MILES TO THE NEXT STOP,WHILE YOU ARE THERE YOU CAN GO FOR A FEW IN XX RADIUS OF THE SPOT.THAT IS THE WAY I FOUND BEST SO FAR. I ALSO MAKE A NOTE IN A NOTE BOOK MUCH LIKE A SURVEYORS NOTEBOOK,FIELD NOTES ARE HARD TO REMBER WHEN YOU ARE NOT THERE IN THE FIELD WRITING THEM DOWN VERBATUM...JUST A FEW THOUGHTS..

 

THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE FOREST DOES NOT EVEN LIVE THERE*********WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS*GEOTRYAGAIN **1803-2003 "LOUSIANA PURCHASE" 200TH ANNIVERSARY AND THE "LEWIS AND CLARK EXPADITION" http://www.lapurchase.org http://www.msnusers.com/MissouriTrails

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If you can knock it down to a list of counties you will be concentrating in, some software I found and included links for in my process list would be useful.

 

There is some advance prep necessary, but not much more than with printing and dealing with a gazillion pages worth of datasheets. If you revisit places, much if it is one-time work and then just some maintenance of data.

 

http://members.cox.net/dmbleess/geocache/benchmarks.txt

 

Most of what I was going to write here, I'm just going to incorporate into that document. I may end up having to convert the entire thing to html now to make it more presentable to the world at large. Initially these ware just my personal notes.

 

SA / PP-ASEL-I

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