Location, Location ...

[ArtMan]

The following is from the log for HV2262: The listed location is incorrect, being in the middle of Gallows Road. The actual location is about 280 feet to the West on the Mattress Discounters building.

 

With all due respect to Black Dog Trackers, I believe this log represents a misunderstanding of the information on the benchmark page, which states that the latitude and longitude have been approximated from a topographic map and are accurate only to +/- six minutes, i.e., approx. 600 feet.

 

On the NGS datasheets, this information is placed just below the coordinates, but on the geocaching.com site, it is way down at the bottom of the page, easily missed.

 

So the information (coordinates) is not "incorrect," it is approximate. The text description appears to accurately describe the location of the station.

 

Also, if you look on the NGS datasheet, a few lines below the coordinates, you will see lines for Vertical and/or Horizontal Order, indicating the degree of accuracy in each case. For this station, the vertical order is second class, indicating a certain (fair) level of accuracy. No horizontal class is stated at all, suggestion, in view of the map scaling disclamer, that you shouldn't rely on the latitude and longitude very much at all.

 

By the way, although I use my handheld GPS to get to the vicinity of a survey mark, I normally use the text description to find the actual mark. In my area, the survey disks are often overgrown and the precise directions (e.g., 4.2 feet northwest of utility pole A123) are a much better way of finding the statio