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Star_Wolf and mom, I think anyone that likes the outdoors will like geocaching. While the hunting down of the cache is the objective, or destination, it is the journey that is the real pleasure for most. The walk in a park or in the woods or on a trail. It’s the time spent with the family or a friend, with a pet or by one’s self. It’s a little of the high tech world. It’s a lot of back to nature. It’s 16 year olds wanting to get out and explore. It’s retired kids looking to pick up where they left off so many years ago. It’s making new friends and looking forward to happening upon them from time to time on the trails. It about getting as involved as you want or not geting involved at all. All it costs is as little as $100 for a simple GPS and a means to travel to the cache sites. And, an inquisitive mind to always wonder what the next adventure will bring.
Thanks all! It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t have a good Sunday. Got 9 finds in. I thought I was slowing down but it felt good to go nuts again.
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaHi Star_Wolf14 and welcome to the hobby. Clear your evenings and weekends from commitments. You’ll be spending most of them geocaching!
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaHey Lee, FB OM! 73
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaI understand the spirit of the topic! The day after that Eau Claire ”washout”, I did one in Wausau. Picked four ticks off of my arm and after gassing up the van, found a tick crawling across the seat! Already had to pull one from Kanook after doing a cache in the Kettle Moraine near my house. Darned things!
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaHow about if the cache is alongside a river and is below the water because of flooding, it’s a find. Had this happen last week in Eau Claire.
The rocks weren’t by chance in reference to Chief O’Brien II, was it???
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaI’d like to be there just to stand back and enjoy a good laugh! I remember pointing to it for someone and they still didn’t recognize it! I got a picture of it here but unless you know what you’re looking at, it’s just a bunch of…
I guess I should have mentioned the ones that I was on. They were; Cayboo’s Cache and Basque Sheephearder. Both in areas that are easy to get to and near the city.
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaWith great press like that, how can any entity be against geocaching?
That’s the great thing about travel bugs. You never know where they are going to end up. Wish there were more cheeseheads there representing us but we put up a good fight. Nobody pulled off my Packers knit cap or tried to toss me in the rivers. (hard water) But seriously, the hospitality of BSpeng and everyone else involved was fantastic. It was great meeting some familiar names and some not familiar that recognized Jeff and I. While I enjoy the peace and quite of solo caching, these social events from time to time are really a whooop!
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaVery nice article, but I cringed when the author said some caches are buried. But then again, some are. While in Florida this past fall, there were some near my hotel, but all were buried in the sand on beaches and sand bars. Guess they don’t have the beach groomers to worry about. If anyone were to use this otherwise great article, I’d mention the Florida sand thing so they don’t think we are burying caches up here too.
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaMy brother has eight years on me and was an engineering student at Marquette U. He took me to the computer lab once and I was amazed at all the punch cards and tape. I brought back a big tape reel and that hung on my wall as art for years. Wish I had it now. Might be worth something on eBay.
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaSeeing as the topic has turned to reminising, someplace in my basement is my 300 baud modem for my old VIC-20. I had friends at Wisconsin Bell and they got me a Bell phone with attached modem. 1200 baud! Back then we were all excited about the prospects of 9600 coming out. But even before all of this, some of us were already communicating digitally over the airways. I had a basement full of old Teletype machines. Those were the typewriters you heard kechunking in the backround on the old TV news broadcasts. Lots of early movies showed them getting messages from news services. We used these over the radio waves with the earliest forms of modems, which is a contraction for MOdulate DEModulate. Most of these were home-made from plans in the Ham Radio magazines. All this old stuff was a five bit per character device which only gave you upper case and a few symbols. Then along came the Teletype Model 33 which was the first ASCII machine. It was eight bit and could send both cases and all sorts of other characters. About this time the Apple Boys got the green machine on the market and all the mechanical thrashing around was forever doomed. But before the internet, we had bulletin boards that you could access over the airwaves. The trouble was that all these machines used rolls of paper rather than a video display. Sometimes a mischevious person would send a long string of carriage returns, emptying the spools of paper any Ham monitoring the frequency would have.
Everyone has heard the term bandwidth, but it started in radio as the frequencies we could use were in ”bands” That is, segments of the radio spectrum that are harmonics of each other, more or less. Bandwidth became important because the faster the speed of communication, the wider the signal or more bandwidth it hogs up. The morse code is a slow but effective means of communication and uses very little bandwidth. You can stuff a whold bunch of morse code signal in a small bandwidth. Video, as in television channels, gobble up tremendous chunks of bandwidth.
If this were a virtual cache, to log it you have to tell the significance of RYRYRYRY and *U*U*U*U*U*U.
Steve Bukosky
WaukeshaWell, to muddy up the waters a bit, I’ve got Road Runner cable and it has been fantastic. I love doing the bandwidth speed tests. Just did Bandwidth Place at 2.2 megabits per second. One other one at 1.9 and a third, hmm, only 954 Kbps. Well, that one was to Los Angeles.
I almost bit for the phone companies offer but found that the price shot up to more than RR after the special offer period and the guarantee was pretty pokey. I believe that RR has dial up but I use the 800 number for our company server and make big use of my Hotmail address. Only trouble is that from most hotel rooms I might only get a 14,400Bps connection. Oh, the pain!
I’ve noticed a flaw in cache of the month in that some caches that have been around for a relatively long time get nominated. I doubt that we want to make this complicated, but it seems that nominees for cache of the month should have been place in or just prior to that month.
With the growth of our numbers, many new cachers are finding older caches and to them, it is their cache of the month. See my point? I agree that COTY just needs to get off the ground.
Steve Bukosky
Waukesha -
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