(no subject)

[moominmolly]

Last night, I was wandering through the woods and found a mysterious little box. It was not a geocache, but it did prompt vespid_interest to mention geocaching as something I in particular would get a kick out of, which several different people have done over the years. Anyway, it made me curious:

[Poll #1414358]

Comments

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly going to try it, since it's the free solution :), but vespid_interest reports that it's not quite accurate enough.

[cuthalion.livejournal.com]

If you can find a GPS with a compass in it you'll have more fun. I don't know about standalone GPS units newer than 2000 (then, the higher end ones had it, the lower end ones did not).

Any real GPS should be accurate enough for geocaching. Cell tower triangulation is not accurate enough. The iPhone 3G has a real GPS reciever while the 2G does not. The newly announced 3GS has a magnetometer (compass). I haven't used the iphone's software so I can't tell you whether it's convenient for asking "how far away and what direction is (37.785945,-122.39454)"

As for your poll: I also maintained a cache for a few years (though someone else took it over a while ago)

[vespid-interest.livejournal.com]

The iPhone 3G GPS usually has an accuracy of 56 feet for me, or 34 if I'm really lucky. (Nothing in between oddly.) I've had about a 50% success rate finding caches within 56-feet which is ok if I'm looking for one on a lark but if I just walked 20 minutes to find a cache it's frustrating to get stuck. It makes me not even want to try next time.
And in the forest where there is no reception it's almost useless.

[cuthalion.livejournal.com]

Aha! Okay the iPhone lacks WAAS it turns out. So it can be less accurate than other GPSes, contrary to what I said above.

I remember those numbers from my old Garmin eTrex Legend (which is what I used for geocaching). Those do have WAAS support, but they also aren't very sensitive, and my experience was similar to yours, except I thought it was more fun than you seem to have.

I think the discrete increments of distance is probably due to the discrete number of satellites it had fixes on.