An aspect of technology that I’ve always admired is its progressive nature. Years ago Geocachers were glad to laboriously enter coordinates digit by digit into their GPS receivers. There was a small amount of joy as the least significant number was accepted with a button push and the adventure began. Sometimes the experience was enhanced by an operator miscue that increased the time-to-target factor as well as the DNF occurrences in cache logs. Container seekers soon found their electronic compasses tethered to their microprocessors with a new avenue for data entry. Then the power of serial data transmission protocols (and then later Universal Serial Bus) provided for mass cache loading and accurate coordinate translation. Global positioning electronics manufacturers soon realized that people craved much more information than location data. They replaced a waypoint number with the name of the cache, and included terrain, difficulty, hint, logs, and other vital details. One of the larger brands has provided wireless sharing amongst compatible units. Now cachers can exchange their favorite waypoints, tracks, and Geocaches to others with a push of a button.
This brings up the question: What next? Technology seems to advance in growth spurts that exponentially take us to places we could only image in the past. Will we be wearing fashionable eye glasses that project the compass/map data on the left pane with the Geocache description, hint, logs and difficulty on the right? Will that progress to contact lenses with similar capabilities?
Join Country1919 and M as we map a way ahead, discuss current events, review new hardware and changes in the caching industry, and try to make us all better Geocachers.
We welcome comments, suggestions, and ideas that will guide us along the trail.
M
