Entering The Twilight Zone

[micro500]

Just last weekend, me and a friend were out geocaching. We started hiking, and i cleared the tracklog like I always do before I go hiking. My GPS was having trouble getting signal. Eventually, though, it got it (suppositily). So I zoomed out to try and find the geocache we were heading for. I zoomed out to a 25 mi radius....nothing. I pressed "find nearest"..."Found None". I immediatly thought that the memmory in my GPS had been erased. So I re-enter the coors, and thr name. "ERROR-Repeat Name". This time I zoomed out even farther to try and figur out were we suppositly are. According to my GPS, we were approx. 100 miles off the coast of Maine. I found that kind of odd since we were still hiking in the woods. So I turned the reciever off (not the unit) and turned it back on to start to regain signal. But this time I selected our location as the geocache. In about 5 min, it regained signal. Then 2 min later, we were in the area of the geocache. A check of my watch revealed we were 30 min ahead of scedule. Unfortuanly we did not find the geocache. But we made it back home.

 

But the story gets weirder. I checked the track log, and heres the route it wais we took:

We started in conn. Then we traveled up to New Hampshire. Then teleported over to the atlantic, were we traveled the 300+ miles back to conn. From there, we hiked.

 

Has anything like this happened to you?

[+Huntceet]

Did you know there was a whopper of a geomagnetic storm this last weekend? That could be the cause of your anomolies.

[+tls11823]

Did you see Rod Serling standing in the background?

[PyroDave]

you forgot your tin foil hat didn't you.

[micro500]

Nope, sorry, I didn't see Rod Sterling, but I did get the chance to meet Elvis.

 

But seriously, no I didn't that there was a geomagnetic storm. Where can I find out about this kind of stuff?

 

(and yes, I did forget my tinfoil hat)

[JohnX]

GPS operation on Sunday the 15th was not optimal. I made 1 find that day and here is a portion of my log.

 

Found the cache after a great deal of trouble with my GPS. The arrow was spinning around randomly and I finally figured out I could only rely on the distance. I crossed a body of water on a log before I figured out what was up. I was all set to log a DNF but the picture of the grinning mug of the first time finder annoyed me enough to not give up. Children should not be allowed to geocache.

 

In reality, the GPS was going crazy and I used the "Where would I hide a cache?/Where wouldn't I hide a cache?" method to locate it.

[micro500]

Something like that happened too. I set the GPS down. It was reading 14 ft. My friend who came with me was watching it. He read off the distance every min or so. It started at 14 ft. It jumped to 100 ft. Weird.......

 

BTW I was geocaching on Saturday 14.

[+91rioja]

Spaceweather

 

This is a great site that will give you information about what is going on with the Sun, sunspots, solar radiation, solar flares, and other things that can kill GPSr performance.

[1goodpuppy]

I had the same thing on the 16th. It would tell me i was 5 feet away. I would stop, scratch my butt and watch the distance go from 5 feet to 135 feet without moving a step. Very frustrating, but all the more challenging. I'm glad someone else had the problem. I was going to call Jeff Rense.