Chirp Support for IPhone

[+user13371]

... I can envision a day where GPSRs or their successor will be so accurate that geocaching will be a very different sort of activity. The days of getting to 50 foot radius area and then searching, will be over. I think eventually there will be positional locators that are accurate to inches, including the height off the ground. Tech will change, and so will games like geocaching

Well, you're right in some ways (tech and the game will change), but I don't see Chirp as being a major factor in that change. And major or not, I'm not sure it's even a positive change.

 

There have been treasure hunt games for centuries -- long before Poe wrote The Gold Bug. Geocaching didn't do-in letter boxing. Super-precise locator technology will not be the death of geocaching or even change it very much. If technology eventually makes it possible to locate something within millimetres - but you don't want your hides to be too easy -- just don't publish coords any more precise than degrees and minutes to two or three decimals places.

 

As for why I'm not even sure the Chirp is a positive thing for geocaching: The quality of any cache is up to the cache owner -- and while some CO's will do good ones, just using a beacon doesn't ensure quality. And while it doesn't ensure quality, a beacon DOES limit finds to folks who have the right hardware. When having specific hardware is more important than having the right skills, I'm not sure it's improving the game by any measure (challenge, enjoyment, appeal to wide audience, etc.).

Edited December 8, 2010 by lee_rimar

[+user13371]

Funny! I just got an email from another member about this old thread. I had to look here to see what I had said, because I'd mostly forgotten about Chirp.

 

So has most of the world, it seems...