Drone-O-Caching

[+y2kbug]

Drone-O-Caching, the practice of flying a drone exactly over a Geocache location and taking a photo from 100'. The flight must start from at least 1320 feet away (1/4 mile, up to the maximum range of the drone), and the photo must show the exact spot where the Geocache is located, although not necessarily the Geocache itself......Hell Yea. In order to achieve this the drone app must be able to mission the drone to a GPS Lat/Lon or must display Lat/Lon on the FPV screen. I'm going to experiment with this this weekend.

 

??

[+barefootjeff]

You'd have a hard time doing that on many of the caches around here. This is the view from above my most recent hide - somewhere under the forest canopy is a cache, but where?

 

 

[+niraD]

And if they figure out how to open the cache, sign the log, and replace the cache, then they can even log a Find.

[+papu66]

Are there any caches out there that need a drone to retrieve? I have never come across one.

I suppose they can lift a bit of cargo...

 

I don't know much about drones as you can see, but the possibilities seem interesting. You could for example

search for cache coordinates that are only visible to drone. 

[+hzoi]

6 hours ago, papu66 said:

Are there any caches out there that need a drone to retrieve? I have never come across one.

 

There may be a handful out there that predate the guidance put out to reviewers, but since 2015 or so, reviewers will not (knowingly) publish a cache that involves drone placement or retrieval.

 

Past discussions:

 

 

[+cerberus1]

11 hours ago, papu66 said:

Are there any caches out there that need a drone to retrieve? I have never come across one.

I suppose they can lift a bit of cargo...

 

There's one that most folks who've done it use a lot of rope to access.  A climb partner left without me and did it solo...

The cache page mentions something about grabbing it with an rc copter, showing it's age.  

I'd think todays larger drones would grab that cache easily.

[+cerberus1]

19 hours ago, y2kbug said:

Drone-O-Caching, the practice of flying a drone exactly over a Geocache location and taking a photo from 100'. The flight must start from at least 1320 feet away (1/4 mile, up to the maximum range of the drone), and the photo must show the exact spot where the Geocache is located, although not necessarily the Geocache itself......Hell Yea. In order to achieve this the drone app must be able to mission the drone to a GPS Lat/Lon or must display Lat/Lon on the FPV screen. I'm going to experiment with this this weekend.

 

Saw this come up online just a day or two ago, with the exact wording.  Weird...

[+fuzziebear3]

On 3/15/2019 at 3:00 PM, cerberus1 said:

 

There's one that most folks who've done it use a lot of rope to access.  A climb partner left without me and did it solo...

The cache page mentions something about grabbing it with an rc copter, showing it's age.  

I'd think todays larger drones would grab that cache easily.

 

If it is the one I know, the drone method was attempted and failed.  That cache is fairly heavy, the drone can't manage it.

Another approach was to use the drone to place ropes for the cache.  That also had issues, you have to be careful not to get the ropes tangled with the rotors.

 

[+ScoutingForCaches]

A group of us went after one this past weekend and after trying several ways to get in to ground zero we started joking about needing a drone so that we could see if there were any trails we had missed or to find a way in without having to cross a large body of water. We didn't have one, and we finally found our way in but it was a short but interesting discussion.

[+vw_k]

Sounds fun but it's really a seperate game from geocaching as it doesn't involve a person physically going to the location and signing the log. It could be developed into an interesting hobby though if there were locations that allowed drones and which made for an interesting photograph from above.

 

There was someone who would leave notes on geocache pages saying they'd virtually flown over the co-ordinates in an aircraft simulation game but they only wrote a note and didn't claim a find.

[+TeamRabbitRun]

I don't really get it.  You have a drone, which you control with some device, which shows you the lat/lon of the drone in real time.

 

So you fly the drone to a pre-selected set of coordinates, and somehow this is supposed to tie into geocaching.

 

Why wouldn't you consider this a game all on it's own? "Precision Droning" or something like that.

 

And, if personal drones can't automatically navigate to a set of coords, I'd be surprised. I'm sure that capability will be shortly forthcoming.

 

At that point, the pilot is out of it. Load a list, and tell the drone to fly to these precise locations and take a picture.  What fun!  But, geocaching?

 

They just took Benchmarking out of my hobby, which has a whole lot more in common with geocaching than 'Precision Droning'!