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ABC's 20/20 show on getting lost with GPS


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ABC's 20/20 has a story tonight on how folks get lost from actually USING their GPS. Mostly focused on the Navigation units.

 

However, made me think...has using your GPS too much ever had you lost...even if temporarily.

Once after a day of caching out-of-state, we found a BBQ place listed on our Nuvi and hit go. Eventhough it kept taking us farther and farther from civilization, we, brain-dead from caching, kept following until the road turned into a muddy path in the middle of a corn field.

 

Another time, when we first started caching, we set-out into the hills of West Virginia. Without any trail or topo maps loaded, we got ourselves into a real mess. There was a point about an hour and a half before dark that we were pretty worried.

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A couple from this province was driving in the western US and apparently blindly followed their GPS into a remote mountain pass. They got stuck in the mud, and the husband set off on foot after 3 days to look for help. The wife survived for 48 days before being found by some hunters, but the husband's body was found a year and a half later about 10 km from help. It was a very tragic example of why not to blindly follow a GPS unit.

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A couple of months ago my wife and I were trying to figure out the best way to get to a cache we wanted to find so we punched in the coordinates into our car's GPS. It told us we needed to drive 5 hours south to the Mexico border, turn around and drive 5 hours back then navigating to the cache (or at least within a nice walking distance). I still have a picture of it around here somewhere.

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Years ago, we were coming to Sacramento Int'l Airport from the south. If we would have blindly followed the idiot GPS unit, we would have ended up on the other side of I-5. We followed our eyes instead & zoomed right up to SAC with no problems at all. Sometimes the old ways are better... :rolleyes:

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ABC's 20/20 has a story tonight on how folks get lost from actually USING their GPS. Mostly focused on the Navigation units.

 

However, made me think...has using your GPS too much ever had you lost...even if temporarily.

Lost?? No. Tell me to take non-existant roads or tracks across fields? Yes. Lead me to roads that end at fences? Yes.

My common sense prevailed so I never got lost.

 

In thinking about last night's show, and knowing that the focus was on dash/navigation GPSrs, I came to the realization that it would be nice if the navigation units had a "track-back" option so you could retrace your way out, like most hand held units have.

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Your brain and your GPS are not on a shared toggle.

 

It is possible to have brain on + GPS on. You can always pull over and confirm where it is telling you to go. I frequently disregard it if it is telling me to from a major to more minor road. Sometimes I was right.. sometimes I just didn't see what it was planning. No big, it re-routes on a fly.

 

But.. usually I am using my GPS to get somewhere I don't know how to get to... so really I am "lost" every time I use it.

 

Shaun

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Wow, interesting story!

 

I used to get lost a lot when I cached with my phone. Even with google maps, I was so far off trail sometimes that it was no help.

 

Now that I use a handheld GPS I never get lost because of the backtrack feature. It is always on, recording my trail at small intervals. Thank god for it! I used it many times to keep me in thje right direction both in the woods and in the water doing kayak caches.

 

I can read a road map fine but my sense of direction is just not too swift. So I use a GPS when driving too. I have had both my handheld GPS and my phone GPS take me longer or unsual ways...but I have to say they have always got me to my destination. I trust them mostly.

Edited by SeekerOfTheWay
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Look what I found using Google...

your-gps-is-wrong.jpg

 

That's funny!

 

Keep in mind that a paper map can be wrong also, and lead you down roads which don't exist, or give you the impression a highway exit is somewhere when it's not. Sometimes, is it really the GPS's fault, where not having the GPS would be better, or do people just need to think what's going on?

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A couple years ago someone made a post about sitting on the west coast and accidently plugging in a route to a location in honolulu. The GPS obediently routed to the nearest boat launch and then instructed the intepid traveler to get in a canoe and paddle 3000 miles. I tried it with my trail GPS. Absolutely hillarious.

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Unless the GPS is completely malfunctioning I don't blame it on the GPS, I blame it on the people that do the maps. With one of my older map sets the GPS map showed an exit ramp leading to a rest area on I-39 south of Rockford, IL. Not only there wasn't a ramp there wasn't a rest area. There was also a highway by where my son lived that showed it dead ended and started again about five miles away. If you were having the GPS route you when you came to that area it tried to reroute you. You have to be a little smarter then the GPS

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Unless the GPS is completely malfunctioning I don't blame it on the GPS, I blame it on the people that do the maps.

 

I didn't get lost, but there's a cache I was trying to navigate to, and the driving directions said to go down the bluff and across the river--no road down the bluff, only a pedestrian/bicycle bridge across the river. I told Garmin how to get to it from the other side of the river (using an unnamed dirt road) and they said they would fix it.

 

The only GPS malfunction I could have blamed for getting lost (I didn't though) was a case of dead batteries. I had marked the location of the vehicle and set off on a longish cache-hunting hike. While I was eating my lunch, the batteries died, so I changed to new batteries. When I got back to my car, I found that the marked location was half a mie away--good thing I didn't need the marked location to find the car.

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Look what I found using Google...

your-gps-is-wrong.jpg

 

That's funny!

 

Keep in mind that a paper map can be wrong also, and lead you down roads which don't exist, or give you the impression a highway exit is somewhere when it's not. Sometimes, is it really the GPS's fault, where not having the GPS would be better, or do people just need to think what's going on?

 

Technically, whether or not a GPS receiver is involved, the problem is the maps. A GPS that provides turn-by-turn directions is just following the routing information available on the base maps. If the base maps has roads that don't exist, or that a road between two points doesn't account for a bridge that no longer exist, the routing algorithm is just going to suggest a route assuming that it has good data.

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Not quite, but I did once get lost on a loop trail where the markers had vanished :blink:

 

I hadn't marked the coords of the car but thank goodness this trail had a gas saver set up because some other geocacher had gotten lost here earlier which required a call to the police. Full story on the cache page- http://coord.info/GC11N6R

 

Ho many times did you walk around in a circle before you figured it out? :rolleyes:

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Our car's GPS routinely likes to try to get us to make turns onto what appears to be fields or houses or roads that look like they've been overgrown and abandoned since 1925. Definitely head-scratching sometimes!

 

Pssh. That's not "lost." That's like the challenge stage -- just think of it as an opportunity for bonus points.

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Technically, whether or not a GPS receiver is involved, the problem is the maps. A GPS that provides turn-by-turn directions is just following the routing information available on the base maps. If the base maps has roads that don't exist, or that a road between two points doesn't account for a bridge that no longer exist, the routing algorithm is just going to suggest a route assuming that it has good data.

 

I ran into that problem a few times. GPS said to head north on the Parkway for ten miles, get off and head back south for ten miles. I guess the map did not show the road going over the Parkway. I had seen that a few other places, as well.

And, of course, the GPS prefers to take me on toll roads. To get to a spot I visit frequently, the GPS says to take I-80 to I-280 to the Turnpike. Faster and cheaper to stay on the main roads. Limited access, but not 'Interstates'.

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lost.. hum..

in the mountains, roads are like zig-zag and often close to another road at a very different altitude,

imagine how well a GPS with position jitter (due to mountain) handle this..

 

This problem drove us quite angry

the roads and the gps newer really lead us even close to the cache site !!

driving arround a few hrs before we agreed to call that cache off that days project,

bummer a puzzle I spend two nights to solve from home.

 

the day after, another area, but much more special and important cache,

so I ended manually route it, and manually handle all GPS turns and such,

that helped finally, after a few wrong turns lead us to motor way entry, with no legal way to get back,

so ha ha another 10 x 2 km driving to get back, lovely :-)

 

bad stuff like this happens offcourse not in own contry, but on vacations,

where area, roads and signs are all new to us.

Edited by OZ2CPU
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OK, two stories....

On a road trip. Getting a little low on gas and nearing lunchtime. Stopped for gas and my wife did a POI search on the Nuvi for lunch spots. We decided pizza was what we wanted. While I filled the gas tank, wife was tapping away on the Nuvi screen. Went inside and paid for the gas, used the rest room and got back in the car. She was scrolling through Nuvi listings 10, 15, 25 miles away. I pointed through the front windshield, "How about that one?" Yup, a Pizza Hut a few doors up, clearly visible from the car. Not listed in the Nuvi. Got a good laugh out of that.

 

Took a trip from Chicago to Macinac Island. Yes, a big island in Lake Michigan. Nuvi routed us straight to the Auto Ferry Depot in Wisconsin and the route continued from the Depot at the other end on the island. Sure was unusual to see the Nuvi route go across open water and NOT be an error!

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ABC's 20/20 has a story tonight on how folks get lost from actually USING their GPS. Mostly focused on the Navigation units.

 

However, made me think...has using your GPS too much ever had you lost...even if temporarily.

Lost?? No. Tell me to take non-existant roads or tracks across fields? Yes. Lead me to roads that end at fences? Yes.

My common sense prevailed so I never got lost.

 

In thinking about last night's show, and knowing that the focus was on dash/navigation GPSrs, I came to the realization that it would be nice if the navigation units had a "track-back" option so you could retrace your way out, like most hand held units have.

 

Track back would be good.

I think the best story that had a good ending was a few years back when a young family from California was visiting Dad's house on the Oregon Coast for Christmas. Dad gave Son a car navigator for a Christmas present which Son used to set a route back home. They followed the thing up a high mountain pass and got stuck in the snow and most likely the entire family was going to die there. Three days later with two states full of cops on alert but no one knowing exactly where to look, Dad got the idea to go to the store and buy the exact same model GPS. He then went back to his house and put in his son's address and followed the instructions right to the stuck family and was able to winch them out and get them back to safety.

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Look what I found using Google...

your-gps-is-wrong.jpg

That's funny!
What I find most amusing about that photo is that it's an official government-erected sign. It isn't a handmade plywood sign, which means it's a frequent, persistent problem.

 

If the base maps has roads that don't exist, or that a road between two points doesn't account for a bridge that no longer exist, the routing algorithm is just going to suggest a route assuming that it has good data.
Yeah, my brother lives on a road that was never completed. The city built one section starting at one end, and built the other section starting at the other end, but never built the short bit that would connect the two. Delivery drivers (packages, pizza, groceries, whatever) are always getting stuck in one section, unable to figure out how to get to the other section.
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