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New Finnish Waypoint Site


Divine

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There is a new web site dedicated to sharing interesting waypoints around the world: www.gps-waypoints.net. The site is in Finnish and for Finnish. You can search waypoints with different search terms, add your own, get a map of the area etc. More information.

 

These kind of sites (like Waypoint.org too) are good for providing coordinates to interesting places instead of using GC.com to create virtual caches, which are not caches per se.

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This is of course very nice, but the accuracy of the coordinates cannot be guaranteed in any way because of the method the coordinates are gathered: anyone can send wrong coordinates and the possibility of errors is quite strong. After finding a couple of misleading coordinates there arises the question of whether any coordinates in the database can really be trusted at all. I have one personal example of Waypoint.org.

 

I found the following coordinates of Erottaja, Helsinki in Waypoint.org:

 

Helsinki, Erottaja

---

Category=Misc

Waypoint: N6009.999 E02456.800

Submitted by: xxx

Submitted on: 09 May 2002

 

These are WRONG (they are based on KKJ system, in which they are right) but when I tried to correct them, it was not so easy. After sending a couple of e-mails and corrected coordinates to the site administrator, he published my new coordinates as a second waypoint called Erottaja. There was no way of getting rid of the old coordinates and I got tired of trying. Now I checked the situation after a year had passed and -- the original wrong coords were still there and my correction had disappeared altogether. So anyone looking for Erottaja from Waypoint.org can find only the wrong coords. The first published coordinates seem to take precedence over others at least in Waypoint.org web site.

 

It seems that it is so easy to send any kind of data to these databases but correcting false information is hard and useless work.

 

All in all, in my opinion, these waypoint databases are not reliable and since no one can reasonably verify the information in them, they should not be taken very seriously. They are just a form of entertainment and "general Internet stuff".

 

But I guess they are good for finding the obvious places, like amusement parks or railway stations of large cities, or insignificant spots like the nearest public toilet or hot dog stand when exploring a minor Finnish town...

 

By the way, Erottaja in the Finnish gps-waypoint.net is now correct (WGS-84).

 

Thus ends a pedantic man's contribution to this subject.

 

(added text and edited typos)

Edited by Pecchio
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And after some ranting it seems that the new Finnish site is far better than the old Waypoint.org. So please think some of the criticism in my previous message to consider only Waypoint.org. I really will suspend my opinion on gps-waypoints.net until I have got to know the site a little better. The link to "Kansalaisen Karttapaikka" map service of the waypoints is really superb - and a thing I missed when writing the last post.

 

Thus ends not the fluctuant man's postings on this subject... :rolleyes:

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I try that gps-waypoint.net. It didn't understand WSG-84 which is in use in my GPSr. :(

It move that coordinates to something else (I have no energy to calculate them) and the map seem that the points are somewhere else, and far away from original. I think that I should give those coordinates for different form than they are in my GPSr. I don't want to learn all different coordinates, so I give up. :D:D

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Maxxy, you are in the right track. Gps-waypoint.net does not support the coordinates that we geocachers use almost exclusively, that is in the format of Degrees, Minutes and the thousands of minutes, or dd.mm.mmm. The coordinates are really WGS-84, but you will have to "convert" them yourself using the setup of your device, or a calculator.

 

This is at the same time both a very small and a colossal pain in the back regarding the justified and unjustified frustration this gives to a well-meaning contributor to their site.

I'll send some feedback there about this problem since my opinion of the site is getting better and better. I hope I will be heard, or explained happily away...heh.

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I was promptly heard. Now the site supports the familiar coordinate format of dd.mm.mmm. Maxxy, you might want to try again. It seems the site is a one-man-workshop and the owner is pleased to implement the recommendations from users. And since it's Finnish, you can use Finnish when dealing with the site.

 

So this is another compelling reason why this thread should remain English-only... :D

Luckily I know the language and thus am able to understand myself... :)

*Waves hand to the recent language discussion with these stupid comments*

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Now the site supports the familiar coordinate format of dd.mm.mmm. Maxxy, you might want to try again.

I'll try, don't work! The idea is good and the language is perfect, but I don't want to calculate those coordinates. :D And I don't understand why those dd.mm.mmm don't be good enough.

I can do calculating in my work, so I don't want to calculate in free time :):blink:

And by the way, I don't like my english :)

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