Question for Siskyou or others

[Glanceblamm]

I was the inventor of Geocache but could not get the details worked out like the real inventors did. (please note that many thought to install a rear wiper blade on a vehical before someone actually did it)

I still like to think of applications for the hand held GPS unit and (griding out an area) like what was done with compass & rockpiles (tread lightly as said) comes to mind.

My hair brained scheme is that a lot of the GPS units are capable of running a course all by it'self in any direction choosen and at any speed from 1mph to 999mph all from ones easy chair. This can be done in the simulator mode and all marks made will be valid waypoints if the unit is started at a valid waypoint. The unit has to be stopped of course with the user panning back to the said mark if a change in direction is desired.

What I have to work with is the knowledge of my local area as most field lenghts have 1/4 mile rows with others being 1/2 mile and a few at a full two miles. With this in mind, it would not be too bad to let the unit run it's course at 60mph (88fps) or 1min run time per mile with the lesser distances being scaled down to say 15 sec for the 1/4mile or 30sec for the 1/2mile (just to give you and idea of what I am saying)

The above is pretty rough of course but perhaps an application could be made for this with a topographical map in hand?

In reality, I can use my Delorme software to create waypoints with some applications being as simple as targeting and area where a drainage breaks off into four or five fingers in the intrest of Coyote or Fox hunting.

In reality, I have let the unit run it's own course while in the field but it is usually just a mark or two to align myself with a distant gap in the woods as I may plan on returning to that general area on a night hunt without having to walk the entire distance.

Perhaps I am all wet and need to get off my lazy butt and create real marks?

Thanks for any thoughts you have on this (far side) topic.



 

[Siskiyou]

I think I know where you are going, but my head is a little stuffed up this morning and I am only on my third mug of coffee.  Now to put my mind in gear without grinding the gears.  Then again I might have to put another pot of coffee on.

Geocachers are made up of a slice of society and are turned on by different things.  There is a group who do not follow the rules of the game and trespass and setup a searcher for a trespass.  Within this group are a number of people who are more interested quantity, than quality.   The more caches they can get in a period the more attractive they are.  These people race between caches in their car, on foot, and on the mountain bike.  A cache that mentions time frames between points, or infer that speed is part of the equation may generate some safety issues.

I like multi step caches, where you have to find the first one before you proceed to the second one.  Using the thought process that a pilot might use flying a small plane on a weekend to gain hours.  He fly’s a large 500-mile circle or box.  Planning airports where he will land and he might do a few touch and go at other airports.  In fact a multi-cache cache for pilots could be fun. 

Setting at my computer I just pulled out my Garmin GPSMap76Cx.  It has Topo2008 and City Navigator loaded on it.  I have selected City Navigator because of its Auto Routing feature.  Suspect you have a similar feature in your DeLorme.  I just selected my BEAR waypoint which is 5.22 miles from me in a direct line.  Next I select GoTo>Follow Road or than Off Road> this gives me a route to follow and road names.  Because I am going most of the Route by road the mileage has increased to 9.7 miles.  There are five turns (intersections) on this route.  There are a number of opportunities to create multi-caches in the route which contain clues that take the searcher to the next cache.  There are a couple of historical markers where one can use them to create a LAT/LONG in you cache write-up.
http://www.geocaching.com/about/cache_types.aspx


My eyes are blinking rapidly now that I am on my second pot coffee.

I have just put myself in the snow driven Mid-West where the world is defined in white.  I have decided to create some geocaches, what tools do I have to work with?

1.   Local knowledge which counts big time.
2.   Gps and mapping software.  In my case I have City Navigator and Topo2008.  Both are loaded on my gps units, and computers. 
3.   Google Earth.
4.   Printer
5.   Note book and pencil


You have a lot of options; first I will try my option #1.  I select one of my waypoints, and using the City Navigator software I use the On road option to create an automatic route to the waypoint.  I can transfer the route from my gps to my computer.  I can view the route using either City Navigator or Topo 2008. 

Using my knowledge of the area and the map I select key locations as waypoints.   Using the waypoint tool I create a waypoint on the map, and this gives me the important LAT/LONG for the Waypoint.  I name the waypoint rather than using the default number because I want to keep the users interest.  Might call it Three Stop Curve because three roads come together.  You continue to build your
It helps to know how to find a cache before creating your own. 
http://www.geocaching.com/about/finding.aspx

You lost me here:
“My hair brained scheme is that a lot of the GPS units are capable of running a course all by it'self in any direction choosen and at any speed from 1mph to 999mph all from ones easy chair. This can be done in the simulator mode and all marks made will be valid waypoints if the unit is started at a valid waypoint. The unit has to be stopped of course with the user panning back to the said mark if a change in direction is desired.

What I have to work with is the knowledge of my local area as most field lenghts have 1/4 mile rows with others being 1/2 mile and a few at a full two miles. With this in mind, it would not be too bad to let the unit run it's course at 60mph (88fps) or 1min run time per mile with the lesser distances being scaled down to say 15 sec for the 1/4mile or 30sec for the 1/2mile (just to give you and idea of what I am saying)”
I started thinking about rows of corn in the Mid-West and best I could come up with is this:
http://www.ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/ageng/gis/ae1264.pdf

But wait we are deer hunters, I have my private geocaches which contain deer data.  My best documented deer hunt was three seasons back.  I drew a premium tag which takes a few priority points to get in running.   Like most deer hunters I went into the planning stage.  There were three locations I scouted in a large hunting Zone. 

I studied Google Earth, TOPO Maps of the area created from My TOPO! Software, National Geographic, National Forest Map, Garmin TOPO2008 on my computer, and in my held gps.  I duplicated the information and gave it to my wife in case I did not return.  I also included the phone number for the two different county sheriff department whose area I was going to be in. 

Two of the most important waypoints I created in my gps unit were where the turn was on to a logging road from the State Highway.  I was scouting in hot dry September and assumed October would be stormy.  It paid off because in October it had snowed and a brim of snow hides the logging road.  The early morning darkness made it a little more difficult.  The faint clearing where I was going to park the pickup was covered with snow, but I had created a waypoint for it. 

Another key item was that on the scouting trip I had the unit in track mode, this may not be important when creating a standard cache but it paid deer hunting.  I did not follow the track step for step but used it for general guidance.   The goal was to hit a couple of waypoints that I identified as stands because of deer trails in the area and large tracks.  I did not see any deer on the scouting trip, but felt the area would be productive. 

Those of you have hunted snow country know that snow on the ground changes how things look in dry weather.  I had my gps compass set up as a pointer to one of my waypoints. (deer stand)  I heard the buck rack vegetation with his large horns.  He was about 98 percent screened by the vegetation and I could not get a clean shot.  Once he took off I moved as fast as I could towards the stand (waypoint) because scouting said that would be my opportunity.  I bagged him.  I was approximately 1.6 miles from my pickup in a direct line.



My scouting had taken me beyond that point.  I found some more areas of interest.  I think some of the activity I found at other locations was made by the same buck.

I got off track because I my interest in geocaching has been muted by so many trespass caches.  When we have company I like to take them into the historical communities that have Virtual caches.  The cache is found the monument and gaining information from it.  Example, On July 5, 1923 deputes Jones and Smith engage two bank robbers at this location.  The pock mark in the brick was caused by a bullet fired by the robbers.  Both robbers were killed.

Caching helped me learn to use a gps because it gave me a target to location.  The kid in me still likes a treasure hunt.

[Glanceblamm]

Very good read a usual. Using those tools makes what I was trying to do seem primitive but sometimes primitive is all you get as your unit may have (gasp) no maps and you home PC decided to crash.

What you do have (in this senario) is either a knowledge of your local area (a good practice field) or perhaps a printed topo map displaying woods & fields along with ponds and waterways. You may even be in an unfamilure fire tower but have the old wall map in place. You do have your gps at hand.

You lost me here:
“My hair brained scheme is that a lot of the GPS units are capable of running a course all by it'self in any direction choosen and at any speed from 1mph to 999mph all from ones easy chair. This can be done in the simulator mode and all marks made will be valid waypoints if the unit is started at a valid waypoint. The unit has to be stopped of course with the user panning back to the said mark if a change in direction is desired.

Clarification of this would be to...
Start the gps.
Go to simulator mode. (would probably work in real mode)
Go to the screen as seen in the picture.

If you push the down arrow on the large center button, you can highlight and toggle in between all the information. If you press the enter button on a section that is high-lighted, (lets say the heading) you can change that information. The speed can be changed from 0.1mph to 999mph and if you do this, the gps will start to run immediately.

The only thing that you have to work with at this point is speed in mph that you have converted to feet per second on your conversion chart that you have made. You will also need a watch to time out the distance based on the feet per second.

The (Mark) button is going to work on this virtual journey but the gps is going to go on past that mark until you highlight the speed and bust it back to 0.0mph. You then have to go to your (track back) screen and use the pan feature to get the cursor back on the waypoint that you have created. At this point, you can go back to the pictured screen and change the heading and perhaps the speed and proceed to the next waypoint that you will make with that mark button.

This would be the lazy mans way of navigationg for sure. It needs some refinement but thest detail would have to be made by someone smarter than I. Please note that not all of the GPS units are not going to display the same as my model but are going to be capable of doing the same thing within their respective formats.

P.S. That (State of Jefferson) is a big one for sure so I dont know if the displayed corrdinate is close to you or not. It should be sitting on top of KSIY with the heading tailored to the active and the msl also adjusted to the actual ground.

[Siskiyou]

At one time that was the favorite hunting location for many young hunters.  During pheasant season the F&G would plant birds out there and hunters up to age 16 could hunt it.  Adults were required to accompany the young hunters and supervision was close.  The program was great for Dad; the young legs did a lot of walking and helped Dads heart keep ticking. 

In the early 1960s the Air Force took it over for a dispersal base.   They lengthen and upgraded the runways for heavier jet aircraft.  The Air Force also killed of the pheasants and other wild birds.  The Air Force only lasted a few years and closed down.

It is used as a secondary Air Tanker base, for many years it was an initial attack Air Tanker Base.  It has seen a lot of aircraft from WWII converted to air tankers.  I remember a converted B-25 bomber having its landing gear collapsed on landing because of the heavy load.  Most airtanker bases have a location incoming aircraft can dump their unused load.

I believe I can come close to matching up with your screen/page if I use my compass page.  And twik the data fields, not exact but similar.

The feet per second were giving me some turbulence because I think in terms of miles per hour when driving to a location, when I start on hunt I think in terms of sunset, and dark.

Being you brought Siskiyou County Airport into the picture, here goes:

Life is a waypoint or some might call it a destination.  In 1965 I was given a multi destination assignment; waypoint was not in my vocabulary.  I was direct to get my falling saw and associated equipment at my Station (waypoint) travel to the Siskiyou County Airport and meet a helicopter at the Air Tanker base. (Waypoint)  At this point my feet per second or miles per hour rate of travelled varied.  At the time of the call I was back on a dirt logging road, the road to and from the Station was dirt and it was 15 miles until I hit pavement.  The paved road out to the airport was nothing to write home about and speed was about 40-45 miles per hour. 

At the airport there was a Bell 47G helicopter, pilot, and heli-attack foreman.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_47
Besides my big yellow Mac chainsaw with 36-inch falling bar we loaded saw fuel, saw tools, and bar oil.  Along with it went fire fighting hand tools.  Our next waypoint was at 41˚46.301N by 122˚28.240W in today’s terms.    In yesterdays term the fire location was given to me in Township, Range, Section, and quarter section.    A few minutes East of the airport on top of an almost barren knob was very good, 4x4 Western Mule deer buck, and a doe.  If I had a gps that location would have become a waypoint.

So my travel in went from 20 or so miles per hour on a rutted dirt road, to pavement, and  70 MPH on board the Bell 47G. 

The first chore with a burning snag is to build a fireline around the snag to stop the fire from spreading.  There was not much of a fire, most of it in the top of the tree.  The big pine was sized up for direction of fall, and a fireline was built surrounding the area the tree was going to fall into.  For the technical mined fireline construction rates are described in Chains Per Hour based on the fuel type. (1 Chain = 66 feet)

In today’s world when the fire is taken care the fireman would pull out his gps and confirm the LAT/LONG, he would then walk the fireline.  With a Garmin gps he would walk the fireline with the Track Log on and the unit will calculate the area within the Track in acres.  He can now report the acreage with a better degree of accuracy. 

In my example there was a fire East of the airport.  The location of the fire was determined by reports from two or more fire lookouts which gave their azimuths and miles to the dispatcher along with estimated Township, Range, and Section.  The dispatcher went to the big map on the wall and for each lookout there is a retractable line and compass.  The point where the two lines cross is the location of the fire.  The dispatcher can pull a line out from the Air Tanker base compass and get a bearing from the base to the fire.  Now days this is done with computer, and the big map on the wall.  We have just expanded our number of waypoints by two lookout towers.

In the scenario the number of waypoints can expand.  Jumping forward 44-years a citizen calls National Forest “A” and says he sees smoke at a bearing of so many miles from his home.  National Forest “A” does not think it is their fire, and it must be on the Forest to the North.  They relayed the information North to the next National Forest.  The citizen was called and he is squared away.  He was asked if he had a gps.  He had one and gave his LAT/LONG and estimated main ridges to the fire.  His location just became a waypoint in the puzzle.  When the bearing was run out from his location it cross one of the lightning fires on Forest “A”.
You hit it on the barrel head about different gps units having similar features, but in different formats.    A basic tool the gps has not replaced is the paper map.  If the user can determined a lat/long on a map, and transfer it to a waypoint in his gps he is on his way to home plate.  It would be nice to have gps units from other manufactures, but my budget calls for the Garmin gps units I have

[Glanceblamm]

Sometimes the directions that one gets is less that precise with one of my favorite lines coming from a notorious movie.

Burt Reynolds: I dont think you understand, I need someone to take this vehical and that one to Anchorage.
Local: You might try the driver brothers.
Burt: Where do they live?
Local: (waves arm in a general direction) and say's, they live over that way!

There are more stories with many being humorus about a local trying to give someone from out of town directions to a destination by describing ten or fifteen landmarks along the way. the landmarks can be hilarious and it sounds like a scavenger hunt for sure just to find them (read a primitive version of Geocache?)

At any rate, one soon realizes that distance = speed divided by time. Tools became more sophisticated of course although we do seem to get bewildered now & again. This can be dangerous for a pilot who after becoming lost, may end up flying the plane into the ground because he forgot that his first priority was to fly the plane.

The lost hiker can fare no better than this as some of the lost have been known to be found running through the woods and screaming at the panic they had at being lost. Today's hiker probably has a cell phone. They may still be prone to panic and you probably could tell us of a tale or two where you could hear the stress in the lost hikers voice about how to get out of the area.

It is now time to steer this topic back to my original question which was to use the GPS unit to create a route to navigate through an area with the Gps doing all of the leg work based on speed and distance. It could easily be practiced but I was wondering how practical or accurate this would be? It could very well be that it would run you into a rock bluff or through a river.

This brings even more questions to mind though. If you mark a corrdinate on the equator, you could possibly make the thing run a due east or west direction and it would eventually come back to the starting point!

But what if the direction was set on latitude to true north with the track being set to cross the pole? if the initial heading was at 360 degrees would the unit become stumped when reaching that point?

Am done now, I think. told you that this thread was a bit hairbrained but created just to explore more possible techniques for using the gps.

P.S. That gps for farming link was a good one. Thanks

[Siskiyou]

Back on subject, first I let the gps do the math when I am driving or hiking.

quote:

“It is now time to steer this topic back to my original question which was to use the GPS unit to create a route to navigate through an area with the Gps doing all of the leg work based on speed and distance. It could easily be practiced but I was wondering how practical or accurate this would be? It could very well be that it would run you into a rock bluff or through a river.”

One of the keys is the software loaded in a gps and what it will do.  A gps designed for aircraft will have different options and share a few options.

I have the different options in my three gps units, the Rino 530HCx, the GPSMAP 76CX, and the automotive 550c Street Pilot.  The 550c will auto route, and along with the 76Cx which has City Navigator along with other mapping software.  Auto routing is written into the City Navigator program.  

I typed in the same City 253 miles from my location into the 550c and the 76Cx.  I selected enter and had I select an on road route for the 76Cx and the 550c automatic selected a road route.  Both units selected the same route turn by turn.  The smallest measurement shown on the 76Cx is 0.1 mi in 00:19 seconds.  

The 550c shows the same right turn at 0.1 MI in 00.22 seconds.  I select the bar across the top of the 550c and the turn list page comes up and I get the complete number of turns for the next 253 pages and time between each turn.  It shows if it is a right or left turn.  The nice thing about the 550c is a voice tells me the name of the turn, how far to the turn and the direction to turn.  The turn is displayed on the screen.  In the lower right corner is a box which gives me the time I will arrive at the turn.  If I go back down the list page it will tell the Estimated arrival time at each turn, and the Estimated arrival time at the City.
It does not matter if you are travelling by foot or in a car the estimated arrival time will vary based on conditions.    Recently I had an appointment down the hill and I tried to gauge my departure to be slightly behind the morning comminute, but arrive at least half hour early for my appointment.  

I did not use the 76Cx for this trip I used the 550c.  Two boxes that I kept my eye on was the arrival time, the Turn In box.  Depending on my speed we would gain a minute, and then we would lose two or three minutes as traffic slowed.  The nice thing about the Turn In box is if you touch it, a display of the upcoming turn will be shown on the screen; a nice feature when driving freeways or busy surface streets.  

As a side note the unit is Bluetooth compatible with my cellphone.

When the 76Cx is running the same route it displays the same information in a slightly different format.  Instead of giving verbal clues it sounds tones.    My wife does not care for the tones.  I can use different data types for data boxes on the pages in the 76Cx.

The distance in feet is only display when the distance between the gps and the turn-waypoint-destination is less than 500-feet.

When I am buck hunting in the National Forest I have a lot of country to roam.  When I arrive at a jump off point I create a waypoint for my vehicle.  Put me out in the woods a few hours and I have put a mile or two between my pickup and myself.  I have spent some time on a track, and watching the surrounding cover.  The sun has set and it is quickly turning dark.
I have a couple of choices, I can track back or I can take the most direct route back.  Tracking back will have me follow that buck backwards which was an extended trip.  Using the compass page pointer I start back to my vehicle.  I have one box showing the Distance to my Destination, and another showing the Time to Destination.
Time to Destination is tricky because many factors impact my speed.  When I enter an old cut block walking is difficult because of the slash on the ground, new growth, and other barriers.  I set down for five minutes and the TOD just increased.  I hit an open meadow and my pace increases.  Fatigue sets in and I slow down.  I hit a skid road and my pace picks up, and the TOD decreases along with the Distance to Destination.

I am comfortable in the woods and did a pre-plan night journey in an area I hunt every few years.  The location is over a hundred miles from home.  The goal was to simulate what I have done deer hunting for years.  Knowing the last 30-minutes of legal light is the critical time of day; I like to be out on deer trails and crossing until dark.  Many a night I have hiked back to the rig in moon light or in the light of my headlamp.  Carrying my daypack which I normally carry in hunting season I hiked back to a distant crossing where I had killed a deer.  It was a black night without any natural light.  I first selected my parking waypoint in the gps, which gave me a compass bearing.  Next I shoot the bearing and set it with my Silva Ranger compass as a backup.  I can fall and break the gps or the batteries can go dead.
It was a good exercise.  The logging slash meant that I had to keep changing course to get around it.  The key was the compass pointer in my gps kept point at my pickup, and I knew how far I had to go.  When I switch to the map page I could see my location in relationship to the pickup.  I like following the course depicted on the map page.

Having taken calls from people lost in the woods I wished I could hand them a gps.  In another case I would have given a caller foam ear plugs because he was taking a lot of heat from his wife.  Cell phones can help get you out of a jam, but most of our mountain locations do not have cellphone service unless you are on a high peak, move a few feet and the service is gone.

You ask for speed and distance, I would change that to time and distance.  You can take a busy airtanker base, which shares runways and airspace with commercial and private aircraft and the pilot cannot give a good ETA to the fire until he is off the ground and heading for the fire.  

[Glanceblamm]

Very good post and one that can educate all.

As for myself, I will begin playing with geometrical shapes within a confined then a larger area. A simple exercise may be to map out both sides of a football field then run the route to verifiy accuracy.

I could not resist having some play time at the North Pole first and am dialing it in so as to give the gps a starting point. I am encountering magnetic interferance on the compass just past the 84th parallel but need to continue as I stopped this run at the point where the interferance started.

The goal here is just to see how the gps will behave in that area. The closest that I have came to an expermint like this was when I had the coordinate for Tiapea Tiwan locked in on an actual trip. When I selected Go To and then used the Pan to manually run that line, the cursor first headed up the screen for a considerable distance and then back down the screen!

I did not get to make the actual trip as I returned home from the LA airport (google formosa explosion 2004) for the details if interested.

[Siskiyou]

Last night I did a search for the North Pole in my 76Cx.  I found N. Pole, AK, not the North Pole in the ice pack in Greenland. 

[Glanceblamm]

My last coordinate was at
N84 41.87
W124 56.60

Need to get up to that 90degree mark of course and perhaps put that pole in the middle of a one square mile box. I think the unit will not have a problem with the (go to) on any of the four waypoints but could run into trouble if I let the gps cross the line on a compass course of an exact degree?

To actually be there, I hear that at times there can be four north poles (as said by a compass) and they can be as far as 60yds apart [sic] whittmans wobble or something of that nature?
I am dialing in the magnetic heading for right now and may be able to continue this evening.