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[goirish75]

@Zollinger wrote:

Dang it I just hide two new caches in the middle of the Kettle Moraine State Forest. Still waiting for them to be published. My question is how accurate are the smart phones? Do they get good reception under semi heavy tree cover?
Dawn

When I hide a cache I never use my phone, i only use my Oregon and I let it average a waypoint after its been sitting for a few minutes. When hiding, i want the most accurate coordinates I can provide. But when caching, I dont mind being off a little, just gotta use the eyeballs and the caching instincts then. Phones seem to be pretty good in most environments in my opinion, but they are more delicate. Dont wanna drop it, bang it, get it wet etc…I do think that dedicated GPSr’s using the WAAS enabled correction really makes them superior to smartphones, but smartphones are unbelievable for on the fly caching, and road navigation at the click of a button. I like to have both in my arsenal.

[Barry Butrymowicz]

I usually look at new cacher names that show up as a found on one of our caches and send them a note. It does not really bother us to have many emails in our discovery folder, but lately we are getting sick of these logs:

Log Date: 7/5/2011
Found it…..

Log Date: 7/17/2011

TFTC

or have even gotten some of these lately “.”

out of the 180+ caches we have we would have to guess that 25% are micros, and most of them are Lil Otter caches that I have left as original as possible to keep their integrity.

We will also leave a TFTC, on any and all guardrail and LPH caches, this is the way that we look at it, if it took longer to write up the cache page than it did to walk from the car and place the hide, that is all you are getting for a log.

Our numbers have went way down this year, but we have been focusing more on finding the good caches then the numbers runs.

We even have more fun looking for benchmarks then a guardrail hide, at least up here, some of them will take you great places, like our newest hides that are at historical firetowers (or the remains of them)

Was thinking of placing a cache called TFTC and see what kind of logs we get.

[Team Deejay]

My experience with phone GPS units is that they will generally match the reading on my Garmin………..eventually. If I get to a spot and stop, my Garmin settles down in about 10 seconds. My phone catches up in around 3 minutes. This assumes no tree cover. If you are in the woods (or even around a lot of buildings) the GPS in your phone is going to cut in and out as they are just not designed for this use. Worse, when your phone loses GPS connectivity, it will switch over to cell tower triangulation (probably good to about 500 feet) or, worse, address lookup based on whatever WiFi signal it can detect (basically worthless), without informing the user. This is why we get caches submitted that end up being off by more than 1000 feet. Also, your phone GPS units has algorithms built-in to anticipate where you are going. To see this in action, have someone drive your car while you look at the map function on your phone. Have them drive 40 MPH or so, and the suddenly stop at an intersection. As long as the road continues, you will see the marker on your map keep going, even though you are stopped. Wait long enough and it will “jump back” to where you actually are. This is definitely not the sort of behavior you want when placing a cache.

[-cheeto-]

And that sort of information should be prominent on the report a new cache form by the coordinates fields. Like a “If you want to learn more about getting accurate coordinates for your new geocache, click here” type thing.

[BeccaDay]

Very good idea cheeto.

Not all who wander are lost. -J.R.R. Tolkien

[-cheeto-]

@beccaday wrote:

Very good idea cheeto.

I submitted it to their feedback area… never know!

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