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British Grid coords listed on Geocaching.com


nashuan

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I am working on a puzzle cache Ugly's Cache and as it has a 5/5 rating you can imagine that it is difficult to solve by design.

 

Without giving away too much information on a public forum, I've been able to translate the puzzle on the cache page but this alone does not give you your final answer. effectively, It's a puzzle within a puzzle. I am wondering if the numbers I've come up with from my initial translation correspond to a different type of coord system and where the "posted coords" are located on the cache page, I clicked the "other conversions" button to see if the numbers I came up with were close. In fact, the ones shown under the headding "British Grid" Link to "other conversions" page might be workable.

 

I copied the numbers listed (-5123530 2244639) to my clip board and then pasted them to several programs such as Google Earth, hoping that they would bring me to the posted coords but I always get an error message saying the program does not recognize the format. Does anyone know how to plug these numbers into a mapping program? They should bring you to Pepperell, Massachusetts in the U.S.

Edited by nashuan
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I resolved the coords needed for WP1 a short time after posting this message (been working on them for over a year - figures LOL). They had nothing to do with the British Grid, but I wanted to know how to use that system anyway and so posted the question here. If the numbers are available on geocaching.com's site, you would think that they could be used somehow in a common mapping program.

 

Yes, it seemed like the information I was finding online kept pointing to this coordinate system only being useful in the UK. Thanks for the help.

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Thanks all for reading my post(s) and thanks Out12 for the extra helping of encouragement. Yesterday, I completed this 5/5 cache (as my 1700th find!) with nine other cachers plus the Cache Owner and his son came along to make sure we didn't get into any trouble. It was a great outing with a great goup of cachers. See my log entry here

 

Yes, as it turned out, British Coords were not needed to solve the puzzle, though I am still interested in knowing how to use them. I understand that they are used primarily in England, but Groundspeak provides a set of numbers that are called British coords and they have to have gotten those numbers from somewhere. Some how you have to be able to interpret what they (-5123530 2244639 in this case) mean and how they would bring you to Pepperell, Mass. in the U.S..

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I understand that they are used primarily in England, but Groundspeak provides a set of numbers that are called British coords and they have to have gotten those numbers from somewhere. Some how you have to be able to interpret what they (-5123530 2244639 in this case) mean and how they would bring you to Pepperell, Mass. in the U.S..

i wouldn't say they're used "primarily" in england, i'd rather say they're valid only in england/UK. of course, if you have a universal formula that converts british grid coordinates to something global (be it UTM or plain old long/lat) or the other way around, then you can just put any coords in there and get your converted coords out, even if they're actually invalid. the negative numbers you see are probably indication that the coords are actually not valid. but then again of course i don't know squat about the british grid really, so who knows?

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British Grid - Ordnace Survey.

The UK is divided into a grid (squares) so co-ord numbers alone can be repeated several times across the UK!

Two letters at the start of the numbers are used to locate which part of the country you need to look.

 

Also fun in the UK, as we have the Prime Meridian of 0 degrees East/West.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Meridian

 

Which has a cache!

 

Worth a read, if you're interested.

http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/...ts/geo0667.html

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