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My Founds and Benchmarks?


3E+K

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Your smiley count doesn't increase with benchmark finds.

Some (now grandfathered) virtuals out are merely a benchmark find, with someone figuring a way to get that smiley.

One, somehow allows hundreds of finds on it.

Might be why you asked?

Benchmarks are listed in the quick view area of your profile.

 

Forgot to add...

Others can see your benchmark finds by clicking on your profile, clicking on geocaches and looking at your geocaches found list, your benchmark found is at the bottom of all the other icons.

Edited by cerberus1
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Does anybody have any incite into this?

 

Benchmarks were never any form of geocache. They were not placed, maintained, thought up by, nor owned by geocachers (or the corresponding webpage for each).

 

At least with virtuals, and locationless caches, the idea of was begun by geocachers.

 

Benchmarking was always just a form of addendum activity, that could be done while geocaching. Thus, as such, benchmarks finds were never included in the smileys.

 

Personally, I enjoy benchmarking more than geocaching.

Edited by LSUFan
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I'm happy that they continue to support it. Though I suspect in a grudging sort of way.

 

The manner in which Challenges suddenly were scrapped and expunged from the system I find in no way comforting.

 

While on vacation, over Thanksgiving, I was having a real benchmarking holiday. Such fun! Finding triangulation stations (including the very mysterious abandoned one :ph34r: ) was so enjoyable I kept getting sidetracked from geocaching. I think I logged about 75 marks, with accompanying photos, when I returned home.

 

Very much looking forward to the next trip out. I think I need two GPSrs, one for caches and one for benchmarks.

 

Before the trip I hacked together a conversion program from NGS to GPX/XML as I very much liked the preserved layout of the reference mark table from the old C program and liked the logs of the NGS>GPX program, further, I added the ability to take an entire state archive (California has about 66,000) and pick out stations from a rectangle (also telling me how many it extracted and converted, which is helpful when managing the limitation of 5,000 geocaches in my unit.) At some point I'll revisit it as I wish to pick out stations from a point with a radius I choose. It isn't beautiful, but it works :)

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I'm happy that they continue to support it. Though I suspect in a grudging sort of way.

 

The manner in which Challenges suddenly were scrapped and expunged from the system I find in no way comforting.

The Groundspeak folks are aware that professional surveyors sometimes look at benchmark logs on Gc.com. And they're in touch with NGS (Dave Doyle, right?). So although it's frustrating that they've never updated their copy of the NGS database, I'm not worried about them suddenly removing it.

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Very much looking forward to the next trip out. I think I need two GPSrs, one for caches and one for benchmarks.

 

Before the trip I hacked together a conversion program from NGS to GPX/XML as I very much liked the preserved layout of the reference mark table from the old C program and liked the logs of the NGS>GPX program, further, I added the ability to take an entire state archive (California has about 66,000) and pick out stations from a rectangle (also telling me how many it extracted and converted, which is helpful when managing the limitation of 5,000 geocaches in my unit.) At some point I'll revisit it as I wish to pick out stations from a point with a radius I choose. It isn't beautiful, but it works :)

 

If you have GSAK, you could use that and NGS>GPX to make a sortable database that you can filter any way you want to get however many benchmarks you want to hunt. Also, if those GPS units are Garmins, it's possible that you might be able to use GSAK and macros to load a lot more benchmarks onto a GPS as Points of Interest. (I know I was able previously to load all the benchmarks for my state onto a Garmin Nuvi.)

 

I also have over 12,000 benchmarks for my state loaded into GDAK on my low end android smartphone. (GDAK supports multiple databases and gets it's databases from GSAK. So I have multiple databases for Benchmarks and Geocaches.)

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A while back, geocaching.com had a suggestions area on the forum. I asked that they display nearby Benchmarks on a map as they do geocaches. My suggestion fell on deft ears and the suggestions area disappeared. If a map displaying nearby Benchmarks were available, I think more people would hunt them and it would make my hunting simpler. At one time, I had found more Benchmarks than geocaches.

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What gives??

 

Give the expert sleuths here on the Benchmarking Forum something to work with. Hopefully a very clear photo which shows the setting agency, designation and year set (or written info of same). A HH2 Lat/Long in the NGS format of DDDMMSS.s. A description of the setting location - roads, railroads, bridges, culverts and other nearby features.

 

Chances are that it is a mark that does not have a PID in the NGS Data Sheets, but someone may be able to dig a description out of another source.

 

Read the pinned subjects at the top of this page. kayakbird

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What gives??

 

Give the expert sleuths here on the Benchmarking Forum something to work with. Hopefully a very clear photo which shows the setting agency, designation and year set (or written info of same). A HH2 Lat/Long in the NGS format of DDDMMSS.s. A description of the setting location - roads, railroads, bridges, culverts and other nearby features.

 

Chances are that it is a mark that does not have a PID in the NGS Data Sheets, but someone may be able to dig a description out of another source.

 

Read the pinned subjects at the top of this page. kayakbird

 

I am guessing that it is this one. Even though Groundspeak operates both the Geocaching and Waymarking sites, only finds on those benchmarks included in their out-of-date database are listed on your profile page. Why? Who knows!

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Recently I found a bench mark at fort foster, I can not find it on the geocaching benchmark site, but can on the waypoint site, which says it is part of the geocaching site, but when i logged it, it does not show up on my geocaching lists of bench marks found. What gives??

The benchmarks that have been turned into waymarks on Waymarking.com are intentionally ones that are not listed on Geocaching.com. That's precisely why those various Waymarking categories (U.S. benchmarks, UK trigpoints, Disney benchmarks, etc.) were created: to give people a place to log marks that aren't on Gc.com.

 

The two sites are owned by the same company, but your Waymarking "points" have nothing to do with your geocaching "points."

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A while back, geocaching.com had a suggestions area on the forum. I asked that they display nearby Benchmarks on a map as they do geocaches. My suggestion fell on deft ears and the suggestions area disappeared. If a map displaying nearby Benchmarks were available, I think more people would hunt them and it would make my hunting simpler. At one time, I had found more Benchmarks than geocaches.

 

I'd definitely search 'em out if I had a way of pulling them up easily on my GC app. I know I can download a .loc file and bring them in that way, but that doesn't bring in anything but the location. The descriptive info doesn't show and that's almost as - if not more - important than the map view.

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I'd definitely search 'em out if I had a way of pulling them up easily on my GC app. I know I can download a .loc file and bring them in that way, but that doesn't bring in anything but the location. The descriptive info doesn't show and that's almost as - if not more - important than the map view.

 

Yeah, I don't think there's any way of displaying benchmark datasheets on the GC app. If you had an actual GPS receiver, you could convert the NGS datasheets to .gpx files and display them on that unit. That's what I do on my eTrex 20. The instructions for doing that are probably in one of the pinned threads on this forum.

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Very much looking forward to the next trip out. I think I need two GPSrs, one for caches and one for benchmarks.

 

Before the trip I hacked together a conversion program from NGS to GPX/XML as I very much liked the preserved layout of the reference mark table from the old C program and liked the logs of the NGS>GPX program, further, I added the ability to take an entire state archive (California has about 66,000) and pick out stations from a rectangle (also telling me how many it extracted and converted, which is helpful when managing the limitation of 5,000 geocaches in my unit.) At some point I'll revisit it as I wish to pick out stations from a point with a radius I choose. It isn't beautiful, but it works :)

 

If you have GSAK, you could use that and NGS>GPX to make a sortable database that you can filter any way you want to get however many benchmarks you want to hunt. Also, if those GPS units are Garmins, it's possible that you might be able to use GSAK and macros to load a lot more benchmarks onto a GPS as Points of Interest. (I know I was able previously to load all the benchmarks for my state onto a Garmin Nuvi.)

 

I also have over 12,000 benchmarks for my state loaded into GDAK on my low end android smartphone. (GDAK supports multiple databases and gets it's databases from GSAK. So I have multiple databases for Benchmarks and Geocaches.)

 

I generally go to the NOAA site, archive and download entire states. GSAK is rather lightweight for loading in 60,000+ benchmarks.

 

My app allows me to pick out a rectangle (and soon a radius from a single lat/long pair) from two sets of lat/long, collects the ones within and pops them into a GPX file, plus providing me a count of how many I have -- as my poor ol' Oregon 450 only allows me 5,000 "caches". It worked dandy for pulling a chunk of California (mostly Inyo County) and a big slice of Nevada, too, for my trip into the desert. I'd run with about 3,000 caches loaded and about 2,000 benchmarks. Was a bit of a cluttered display, but I was in hog heaven. :)

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I use state files too, though the states I have databases for only have 10-12k benchmarks in them. Those same databases are usable on my low end smartphone, and I've made smaller local area databases for ease of switching between my Geocache database and benchmark databases. GSAK can handle the 63,919 benchmarks (and associated child marks) in California. NGS>GPX doesn't fare quite as well, you have to split the state file into two files to process all of the marks. (Easily done for me using a hex editor called XVI32 that is designed for large files.) I haven't tried loading the entire database for California on my phone, and I won't. If I were going to be hunting marks there I would use smaller local searches. It might be possible to load all of them on a Garmin GPS as Points of Interest though, since any Garmin GPS with their street maps likely has a lot more then 60k POIs. Just don't know for sure if the Nuvi macros work with an Oregon.

 

GSAK can do all sorts of filters (including radius and polygon filters) to narrow down a set of marks to find. With a little help from Google Maps, it's even possible to do Benchmarks on a Route. You can also do far more specific searches, say if you wanted to search for chiseled crosses. (128 chiseled crosses show up on a full text search for "_MARKER: X" including one in San Francisco that was last found in 2010.) Macros and some of GSAK's other options can provide easy access to all sorts of information from within GSAK. (I personally am going to have to rebuild a bunch of my macros, I had some cool stuff including a macro that color coded entries based on specific criteria, like the marker type, and others that pulled info from the datasheet and stored it in custom fields for easy visibility.)

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... GSAK can handle the 63,919 benchmarks (and associated child marks) in California. NGS>GPX doesn't fare quite as well, you have to split the state file into two files to process all of the marks. ...

I just ran California thru NGSGPX the other day, it hung twice but ran thru the whole file the third time. I like to use (G)AWK scripts to extract datasheets out of the state file - its pretty fast.

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GSAK can do all sorts of filters ------

 

 

EdrickV,

 

One more attempt to resolve what I consider to be a glitch in GSAK when I am trying to Hi-grade for older marks to pin on Google Earth.

 

Have you been able to set a filter that will sort for UNK in the history?

 

SX0682 HISTORY - UNK MONUMENTED USGS

 

I know that this mark was there in 1904 - my GeoLog note:

 

This USGS disk was occupied during the 1904 Precise Level Net run between SEATTLE AND HUNTS JUNCTION, WASH. It is listed on page 184 in Special Publication #18, and described as a Note 18 on page 163.

 

NOTE 18.-This type of bench mark has the same lettering as that referred to in note 17,

and is a 3-inch aluminum or bronze cap riveted upon a 3-inch iron pipe, set in the ground,

5 to 6 inches being exposed above the ground. A cross cut in the center of the top is the bench mark.

 

This problem is mostly with elevation named USGS points, which I do Excel data sorts for, and either scroll through those Data Sheets or look at the FIRST_RECV column in a ShapeFile. A rather tedious, time consuming, exercise to come up with a list of unique marks to target on a road trip.

 

Thanks, kayakbird

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GSAK can do all sorts of filters ------

 

 

One more attempt to resolve what I consider to be a glitch in GSAK when I am trying to Hi-grade for older marks to pin on Google Earth.

 

Have you been able to set a filter that will sort for UNK in the history?

 

SX0682 HISTORY - UNK MONUMENTED USGS

 

 

Mike, not sure if this helps or is what you need, but you can use GSAK to search thru all text (which would include history)

 

Click the search tab at top of GSAK, now click filter-----make sure the general tab at top is active---- in the set filters box around the third line down, there is a full text search box. You could just type UNK into this box..... and filter all the marks with UNK in them.

 

The problem I see with this approach, would be all the marks that also have UNKnown stability in their description/text. Might not filter the marks down enough to be of use.

 

Bobby

Edited by LSUFan
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GSAK can do all sorts of filters ------

 

 

One more attempt to resolve what I consider to be a glitch in GSAK when I am trying to Hi-grade for older marks to pin on Google Earth.

 

Have you been able to set a filter that will sort for UNK in the history?

 

SX0682 HISTORY - UNK MONUMENTED USGS

 

 

Mike, not sure if this helps or is what you need, but you can use GSAK to search thru all text (which would include history)

 

Click the search tab at top of GSAK, now click filter-----make sure the general tab at top is active---- in the set filters box around the third line down, there is a full text search box. You could just type UNK into this box..... and filter all the marks with UNK in them.

 

The problem I see with this approach, would be all the marks that also have UNKnown stability in their description/text. Might not filter the marks down enough to be of use.

 

Bobby

 

Thanks, Bobby

 

That worked for UNK. I had been trying to filter for the term UNK MONUMENTED. Figured out that setting the filter for (a space)UNK(a space) will return the 1636 (I think - just spot checked a few)UNK dates out of 21348 points in Washington State.

 

Simplifies life a bunch. MEL

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Mike if I understand correctly, you are wanting to search for marks that have an unknown monumentation date.

 

If you have used NGS-GPX to convert the datasheets to gpx files before loading into GSAK, then you can try the following:

 

Another filter you can try, is to do the text filter, but check the USE REG EX box. Also search 'everywhere'.

 

Now in the text box type (history.*unk)

 

Make sure to use the parenthesis and everything between them. This will check the text for the word history followed by

unk........in that order.

 

You can also try (unk.*monumented)

Edited by LSUFan
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Didn't see the post on exactly what you were looking for till now, though I did see the responses to it in digest e-mails, and I thought I'd go one better then a filter. I made a GSAK macro that will extract the monumented date (or UNK) and place it in a custom field called Monumented. Then you can filter for UNK easily by typing:

Monumented = "UNK"

in the quick search field. (The quick search may not be shown by default.) You can also do things like this:

Monumented < "1900"

If you want to search for marks created before 1900. This macro can handle intersection station's First Observed note as well. I created it by modifying one of a series of macros I've previously used to extract Setting, Mark type, Setting Code, and Mark Code and put them into individual custom fields. If a mark does not have the properly formatted history entries (CORS for example) the Monumented field will be empty, which you can also filter for using:

Monumented = ""

 

Anyways, here's the macro if you're interested. You do have to create the custom field manually, since I haven't tried working out the code to only create the field when it doesn't exist. Once run on a database, you don't have to run it again on that database unless the database entries change. (AKA you process a newer state archive file that might have newer marks.)

 

#*******************************************
# MacVersion = 1.0
# MacDescription = Monumented Finder
# MacAuthor = EdrickV
# MacFileName = Monumented.gsk
# MacUrl =
#*******************************************


$recno = 0
$part1 = ""
$part2 = ""
$part3 = ""
$part4 = ""
$part5 = ""

Transaction Action=Begin


While not($_Eol)
$recno = $recno + 1
IF frac($Recno/10) = 0
  ShowStatus msg="Processing record $recno of $_count"
endIf 

$base = $d_LongDescription

$part1 = Extract($base,"HISTORY     - Date     Condition        Report By",2)
$part2 = Extract($part1," MONUMENTED",1)
$part3 = Extract($part2,"HISTORY     - ",2)
$part4 = Extract($part3,"FIRST OBSERVED",1)
$part5 = Trim($part4)

$result = CustomPut("Monumented",$part5)

$part1 = ""
$part2 = ""
$part3 = ""
$part4 = ""
$part5 = ""

GoTo Position=Next
EndWhile


Transaction Action=End
Goto Position=Top

 

Edit: Forgot to mention, after adding a custom field if you want to see it in the main view (which also enables sorting via it) you have to use View->Add/Remove Columns. The custom field will also show up on the custom tab of the Search->Filter dialog box, so you could combine UNK searches with other criteria like distance from a specific center point or whatever else you want.

Edited by EdrickV
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EdrickV,

 

Thanks for your input. LSUFan's simple solution above - "Now in the text box type (history.*unk)" - seems to be working perfectly for me. I move that subset from GSAK into my Excel state by state files where I can sort by string number and assign a more accurate 'PLACED' date.

 

Like to target those OTM's. MEL

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