Radio Free QM

Printer Version   Spy on this Cache

Picture clues below!   7 people or teams spying on this cache!  

Hidden On: 12 Feb 2007
Waypoint (Landmark): N024D7
Open Cache:  Non-commercial use only
Cache type:  Unknown
Cache size:   Normal

Difficulty:  (hard)
Terrain:  (easy)

Misc:

Comments:
The park closes at dusk and is patrolled by the local police. Do not attempt to find this cache after dark!

Pictures:

 Free QM!

Found this one by accident while looking for a place to hide one of my own. That park is one I go to a lot. I go there after work to practice juggling whenever I get off early enough.

Accidentally logged a Comment/Question....actually it was a find....sorry.

Great puzzle cache. I didn't have to search too long. Once I had the right coords for the radio towers, I was able to crank out the right answer....That was one of the hardest parts for me on this one.

I've been looking forward to getting this one for a few months. I was waiting for the snow to melt and have time for a lunch break.

TFTC!

calculations had us about 120' off but geosense is a wonderful thing!! I was not leaveing without it!!
my brother solved it and I found it. team work!
As always your caches leave us smileing from the self satisfaction of a puzzle solved, and a cache found! Took the jeep, and traded some swag. TFTC is was a blast.

I updated the puzzle and tweaked the coordinates for using a different data source. It's a slight adjustment but this should help to resolve some of the ambiguities inherent in the presentation of the problem.

I think I had my GPS set for the wrong datum when I recorded the coordinates for this cache. I have been meaning to check on this for quite some time but in the absence of anyone making a serious attempt to find it, I didn't make it a priority. As it turns out, I probably should have because the coordinates I recoded today were about 80 feet from the old ones. The puzzle has been adjusted accordingly. Johnny.

Well, as the last member of the trilateral snow commission that has not found the cache, I realized it was time I rectified that situation. I will say that I remember us searching around ground zero that snow covered morning, but I’m sure that we would not have found it even had we stayed for the rest of the day. Anyway, things sure look different now. Had the whole family out and we found it this time in short order.

Having used the great circle approach to solve this puzzle, my suspicion is that this approach did not yield a significantly more accurate solution that flat earth considering the other variables involved. Anyway, it was a fun exercise and an enjoyable race to the finish. Thanks for the cache!

Well, we finally made it back to finish this one off. What a difference the lack of six inches of fresh snow on the ground makes. Nellsnake #1 and #4 made our way to the park a little before noon, and after exploring around a little, we had the cache in our hands within 5-10 minutes. We left our new trademark sticker in the book and made some trades, including TBs. Nellsnake #4 then felt compelled to explore in and around various natural features in the area for a bit longer before we decided to move on. Thanks for a challenging puzzle cache and for taking us to this interesting area, QM!
[Modified 2007-03-10 15:37:31]

Got it! Took an extended lunch today and went and found the cache. It took a little bit of looking--my GPSr put me about 50 feet away--but without the snow, the likely hiding places are much easier to identify. I took the FTF prize and left a CD and a brand spankin' new deck of cards.

As far as I can tell, there isn't a once-and-done way to solve this one. My method was iterative, generating better and better approximations until everything solved accurately. As for locating the towers, that took some research. I got two of them by plotting the course from an approximate cache location on a map and seeing where it intersected a radio tower. Not exact, but close enough.

Now the funniest thing (in retrospect) is that at least one of us that had been searching previously had dislodged the camouflage. One of us in all likelihood poked the cache container and didn't realize it. The cache was still reasonably well-hidden; it could only be seen from right beside it. I made sure it was well-covered again before I left.

Thanks, QM, for a fun problem to combat the winter blahs. If your intent was to cause me to spend several evenings obsessing over a math problem, you succeeded in spades. I even learned a thing or two. To say more would spoil the fun, so I'll quit.

Strike two. The snow was just too much, even with 3 pairs of eyes searching. After covering a wide area, WP and I averaged our ground zeros to bind the search area, but no dice. It comes a point where using one's geosense becomes geo non-sense. I think that conditions will need to be more favorable to continue the search.
[Modified 2007-02-18 10:35:35]

We arrived about 9:00am and, as Nellsnake mentioned, had no luck. The snow basically nullifies any geosense. The obvious candidates for the hide proved empty, but with the snow, I imagine that one or more of us probably stepped on the thing without knowing it. We left last about 11:30 empty-handed.

My candidate point was 38 feet off according to the nameless one. The nature of the problem means that the actual zero point is either one way or the other, but both of those points, searched intensively and in ever-widening circles, yielded nothing. GPS reception was not great (estimated error in the 20-40 foot range) and got worse as the sky became overcast, which didn't help.

Ack! This one is like finding a buried needle in a frozen haystack under these conditions with a blanket of 6" of snow and ice. Using coordinates that I later found out to be pretty good, I had the confidence to give this one a try on a very brisk Saturday morning. I arrived at about 8 a.m. and had the park essentially to myself for some time except for the occasional dog walker and patrolling police car. After searching every likely area within about 150 feet of my target coordinates, I was joined by Weasley Pilgrim and his son. After another ~15 minutes, Tim from Team Willow joined in the search party. We searched fairly thoroughly and using combined information about the accuracy of our different ground zeroes, we narrowed the search area down quite a bit, but still no luck (at least by 10 a.m. when I had to leave to pick up my son from a morning activity). Good luck to whoever searches for this cache in the near future -- you will likely need it (or at least a lot of perserverence)!

Ok I took the bait! After getting the perquisites taken care off, I set off for a solution. I believe that I used the approach that the “one who shall remain nameless” intended. That is, I shed the flat earth paradigm to which most of us in Trigo land adhere and went for a more rounded approach. After painfully obtaining a few solutions as suggested, I was happy that they were all fairly close, although different enough to make certainty in location – well – uncertain. I was also happy to see that they landed me in a small park as indicated.

So I used what I thought was the most reasonably accurate solution and set off. I was happy to see that I zeroed out in a location that was typical of QM hides, but the snow and ice made searching all but the obvious locations quite unwieldy. I think that my solution is good, but I’ll confirm my coordinates before returning.