Experience doing AL with no data signal for 4 labs in a row

[+rragan]

And here is the tale of using gsmx2's AL's without data strategy for the hard part of the CA-1 highway series.

 

 gw0143 and myself (rragan) tackled part of the CA-1 Adventure lab trek - the hard part where data is scarce to non-existent. We are both Verizon customers so your carrier mileage may vary.

We started with the two locations in Watsonville as this suited our route over from Mountain View. The other 8 in the lab will await another day. Off to a good start and enjoying the new UI. Then Pajaro River to Castroville went smoothly as did Castroville to Seaside. We were hitting our stride. Seaside to Monterey is where our troubles started. Note that this is well before we expected to be lacking data. 

The symptom was: submit an answer and endure 3-5 minutes of spinning cursor of death before being told to submit thw answer when we had Internet connectivity. This was in the heart of Monterey with full bars of LTE on the phone. A second try also failed but then the 3rd went through after a few minutes. First this afflicted me and so I figured IOS but not long after gw0143 ran into it and he uses Android. The problem would come and go but eventually we persevered and got all of this lab submitted. My theory is problems with the Adventure servers led to them not responding which was interpreted by the App as my being offline as no response ever came. This cleared up later so maybe there was some maintenance or something

I opened Carmel-Andrew Molera on my primary phone and got the first two locations to work but then hit the spinning delays again. Figuring I might lose data soon anyway I just left the lab open and set the phone aside. I had tried one of the secondary phones earlier and saw the same spinning problems.  

In any event, I committed the secondary phone #1 on its powerbank and getting data via the mobile hotspot to loading the farthest away set of labs (Ragged Point-San Simeon).  The secondary phone #2 got Lucia-Ragged Point loaded. At this point I realized I needed more phones. Primary phone was on the Carmel-Andrew Molera segment and the other 2 had segments near the end but Big Sur-Lucia was not covered. Turns out gw0143 covered it on one of his phones.  We also killed all the apps on our phones except the AL app and went to Airline mode. 

We tooled down CA-1 enjoying magnificent weather and beautiful scenery. During the trek we picked up 13 other caches which cost us some time but some were co-located with an AL location and some we needed for Southern California DeLorme Challenge. 
When we reached the Elephant Seals and got restored data signal we proceeded to unload our "constipated" backed up-but-ready-to-answer phones. This went quickly. We had recorded all the answers so banging in 10 of them would clear a phone. It sure felt good to get a real device back that I didn't fear knocking out of the AL app.

For my Big Sur missing one, we tried a trick I had heard of. gw0143 logged out of his account on the phone for that segment and I logged in. Lo and behold, I was then able to log all 10. 

What I've learned is it would be possible to do it with two people each with two phones and via the logout/in trick so 4 no signal segments can be logged. 

We called it a day after Cambria as we had burnt all the daylight on these short days. Even so, we got 87 labs and 13 other caches for a nice even 100 finds. 8:30 AM departure and back home at 10 pm for a longish day. 

We saw some bugs off and on in the app. First it would declare a Lab completed even though it wasn't. Youi could tap an uncompleted location sometimes on the map and get to them but other times the tap did nothing but you could go to the list of all locations and resume that way. Annoying but should get fixed.
 

The message “You cannot submit correct answers offline. Check your connection and try again.” is confusing. Only if you are clever can you infer that this means your answer is correct. Better phrasing would be "Correct answer. Remember it and enter it again when you are online.

[+dprovan]

On 12/19/2021 at 2:23 PM, rragan said:

We saw some bugs off and on in the app. First it would declare a Lab completed even though it wasn't. Youi could tap an uncompleted location sometimes on the map and get to them but other times the tap did nothing but you could go to the list of all locations and resume that way.

I've gotten used to a lab being marked completed when it's not. I've found that my workaround is always effective, so I've started making a habit of it. It might work for you.

 

It goes like this:

 

1. On the map, tap the uncompleted stage to turn it on (i.e., solid). Except for the change in the circle on the map, nothing happens. But...
2. Tap somewhere else on the map to deselect the stage, making the circle the faded color again. Now...
3. Tap on the stage again and -- presto! -- this time it comes up correctly.

Your story also confirms my theory (which, by the way, I developed doing some of those same CA-1 adventures) which is that the uncompleted adventures marked completed are caused by doing the adventures off line like that. One of my theories is that it also involves switching between adventures (while on-line, of course). I've done that several times along the CA coast, so I'm guessing you ended up doing that, too.

 

I had a lot of trouble with those CA-1 adventures on my Verizon phone, and it was really starting to annoy me, especially when it wouldn't work even when there was no good reason it shouldn't, including some times it worked in one place, but then wouldn't work when I went back to the same place. Then we started doing the adventures using a different phone with a different service and it was *so* much more reliable. I can't tell you the other service, but Verizon definitely caused some problems.