(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

[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.