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quote:
Originally posted by tin-ear:
Just looked at greyhounder’s post in the geocaching/midwest/WI-coins thread about “registering here for the new Wisconsin geocoins. Hope this is the right place to beg/request 3 of these new coins.Thanks
quote:
Originally posted by kent1915:
My goodness. I wandered away from these boards for a couple months over the summer and I miss the fun! Cest la vie. Embarassedly I would like 5 of them to start, with more to come.
Hold your horses fellas. We are very close to making these coins available for purchase, but we are not there yet. We’re in the final stages of determining what the selling and shipping prices should be and getting the WGA store set up to handle the orders.
There will be a big announcement here and on the geocaching.com forums when we start accepting orders.
No need to beg… as long as you’ve got cash, we’ll sell you some coins.
Thanks for noticing. I hit the milestone 2 weekends ago while on another tear through the West Bend area, hitting 36 caches in a day. I think about 25 caches were Ecorangers caches, so I’ve got to thank them again for all their hides… but I’ve nearly run the rich “cache field” in the West Bend area dry, so I’m going to have to start looking elsewhere.
It only took me 4.5 years to reach 500, with a pathetic average of 0.3 caches per day.
Great info Opossum.
The speedometer in every vehicle I have checked with a GPS has read low or right on, usually 3 to 5 mph low. Some people think there is a law that requires speedometers to be optimistic, but I think it is just the manufacturers covering themselves. But there is such a law in Germany, and to make sure they are in compliance, the speedometer on my BMW motorcycle reads 6 to 8 mph higher than actual.
I have used a GPS in a police vehicle with a calibrated speedometer and both gave the same speed. I have also had my speed “checked” by both radar and laser and found the GPS speed was right on.
So now that you know your speedometer is actually reading higher than you thought, you can drive a little faster (and therefore find a couple more caches in a day).
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 09-18-2005).]
quote:
Originally posted by lohuta:
I think you both are right it has a serious problem.Yesterday i was trying to use it and even though it showed 5 satelites it never gave me coordinates.
If you never got coordinates, then it wasn’t fully “locked” on and probably wouldn’t have synchronized its time.
Updgrade the firmware, reset the unit (see this thread), then turn it on and leave it outside for a long time. The first acquistion, where the unit does not know its position or time, can take 30 minutes. Hit the menu key on the satellite screen, then go to “New Location” to tell it where you are… this should speed the time to lock.
quote:
Originally posted by lohuta:
Iupgraded to a used Garmin gpsmap 60c .Can anyone help change the time and date? Its off by a couple of days and hours.
The unit should sync its date/time with the satellites the first time it gets a lock. All you have to do is tell it what time zone you are in… you can specify it by going to the ‘Time’ setup screen:
– Main Menu (press MENU twice)
– Setup
– TimeIf the unit constantly loses its time after being shut down, this is going to be a hassle for you. Normally a battery backed clock maintains the time, allowing the unit to acquire satellites much faster when turned back on.
Bump due to improper date setting on WGA server…
Bump due to improper date setting on WGA server…
Bump due to improper date setting on WGA server…
My stupid question is… if they can’t handle the current load on geocaching.com (weekend slowdowns, pocket query generator issues), why start another site? If this thing really takes off, what will happen to it during peak periods? (From Jeremy Irish’s profile: “Currently working on keeping up with the ever increasing load on our tiny servers.”)
Because of the lack of approvers (anything goes), there could be many times more waymarks than geocaches listed. Who will pay for storing this information and the bandwidth to serve it? I sure hope there will be a box to “opt out” of giving my premium membership money to waymarking.com… I really don’t need the coords to every McDonald’s restaurant or airport (as someone pointed, most of these waymarks already in a mapping GPS), nor do I feel the need to log / write about my visits to these locations.
I got the group photo from Ken and put it on the WGA website. Click the links below for larger and full resolution versions of the image.
Larger version (250k)
Full resolution version (750k)Is someone going to try to identify everyone this time? (Does anyone have any fabulous prizes to give away so we can make it into a contest?) Of course, Jeff T. is not eligible since he won last time…
quote:
Originally posted by Opossum:
Do you keep your GPS in your pocket so the batteries stay warm?
NiMH batteries actually work slightly better than alkaline in the cold. NiCad batteries are worse than alkaline. For really low temperatures (sub-zero), lithium batteries are the way to go. All batteries have reduced capacity (and thus will go dead quicker) in the cold. Here are some references:
http://www.weasner.com/etx/techtips/2004/battery-lowtemps.html
http://www.bushwalking.org.au/FAQ/FAQ_Batteries.htm
http://www.mongeese.org/photos/tips/On a somewhat unrelated note, if you are using rechargeable batteries in your 60c/60cs (or any other newer Garmin GPS), be sure to go into the setup menu and change your battery type to NiMH… otherwise, the “battery meter” won’t be accurate.
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 07-01-2005).]
quote:
Originally posted by pharmteam:
Any one have a clue? If I turn it off I have to remove battery before it will turn back on.
Lucien of PharmTeam
Lucien, a couple things to try:
[*] Powering up the unit while holding the “Enter” key down will bring up a test screen. At the bottom they’ll be some test names (RAM, ROM, etc.)… after a while they should all say Pass. If not, you’ve got a hardware problem and you’ll have send the unit back.
[*] Powering up the unit while holding the “Page” AND “Enter” keys down (yep, it’s a bit awkward) will reset the unit to out of box. All your settings will be lost, as will any waypoints and maps (at least I think maps are also lost). This reset is usually the first thing recommended by the Garmin techs when you call about a non-working unit… hopefully by erasing all the data on the unit, you get it out of this weird state.
[*] If the reset works, you might want to try upgrading the firmware (http://www.garmin.com/support/collection.jsp?product=010-00322-30). My 60c shipped with firmware 3.50, and I experienced a couple weird lockups when routing with City Navigator maps… I upgraded to 4.00 last week and (knock on wood) have had no issues since.[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 06-29-2005).]
quote:
Originally posted by Opossum:
Since everyone has limited amounts of time, I’m suggesting there may be a way to pool resources and get our features working at a lower cost than asking a limited number of WI volunteers to maintain everything. This is such a popular concept that sourceforge.net is based around the idea of sharing code and has more than 100,000 active projects. Surely we can manage a small handful with fellow geocachers.
The WGA has actually been asked by several other state geo organizations about our “Recent Logs” page, and we’ve provided assistance to a couple of them. Currently there are 2 state geocaching organization websites, Maine and Maryland, waiting to see what I put together for the new Recent Logs system to see if it is something they can “borrow” for their own site.
In my opinion the Maryland geocaching site is set up well, and I’ve been getting some ideas from it. If there are features on that site people would like to see moved to the new WGA site, we could definitely contact them for the code… I think they’d be open to sharing. Since they are also using PHP-Nuke, it would require basically no work on our part to get the same thing working on our new site…
quote:
Originally posted by Opossum:
The WGA volunteers have done a lot to make this work in Wisconsin. Just on the website
front, thanks needs to go to the people who got this site working, and those who
continue to make it work and donate a connection and hardware. I’m not suggesting
we put more on their plate, but try to lessen the load and fix things that exist
but aren’t working.
First, what thing exists on the WGA site that is not working? Definitely there are things that could stand some improvement or more frequent updating but nothing that is outright busted (I hope)…
Second, thanks for your ideas and opinions about the WGA site Opossum. It is definitely great to hear what people want to see on the site, what they don’t like or think could be improved, and have discussions about the merits of various features. As the title forum says, this is a “Suggestion Box”… people should be free to make whatever suggestions they want and then these suggestions should be debated openly… no person should be attacked for making a “bad/stupid/dumb” suggestion. All suggestions are good even if they aren’t implemented, and those who make suggestions should be commended for having the courage to speak up.
Third, cache/cacher stats. Personally I think writing and keeping up to date scripts that “harvest” all kinds of information from geocaching.com is relatively easy, but is not something the WGA should bother doing. Somewhere I have a set of scripts that grabbed information for all Wisconsin caches back in 2002, generated statistics, graphs, and waypoint data files… this was in the pre-pocket query days.
But eventually the folks at geocaching.com figured out what I was doing, my IP address was blocked, I got a nasty note from Jeremy Irish, and I had to agree to not run my set of scripts again. Other people have run into similar issues when they attempted to harvest data… the most visible example is the fights between geocaching.com and the Buxley folks. Right or wrong, geocaching.com frowns on people grabbing and republishing “their” data. From the geocaching.com Terms of Use page (you did read the fine print, right? ):
“Much of the information on the Site is updated on a real time basis and is proprietary or is licensed to Groundspeak by our users or third parties. You agree that you will not use any robot, spider, scraper or other automated means to access the Site for any purpose without our express written permission.”
House of Brew does an excellent job with the cacher stats. Using the information we already collect (with permission) from geocaching.com for our recent logs page, I was planning on offering some very high level cache statistics and graphs, basically tracking activity across all WI caches over time, similar to the following pages on the AZ site:
Growth/Progress Graph
Miscellanous GraphsOf course we would not have historical data going back to 2002 because we have no way of harvesting it… we would start saving recent log information from 2005 on forward.
I feel that offering statistics on individual caches and waypoint/text/Palm files of cache info is not something the WGA needs to get into. Since geocaching.com has all the data, they should provide the better cache (and cacher) statistics. The need to have waypoint files/text files/Palm files containing cache information for download is pretty much eliminated by pocket queries and the ability to manipulate pocket query data with tools like GSAK.
[This message has been edited by jvechinski (edited 06-17-2005).]
quote:
Originally posted by Cathunter:
How about creating a seperate “techno-geek” forum to seperate the technical posts from the general posts?
Based on the fishcachers bunny/pancake thing, it sounds like the suggestion above might be a good one.
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