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Speaker 1: Hello there, welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Poette.
Speaker 1: I'm an editor at how Stuff Works, and as usual
Speaker 1: I have Jonathan Strickland, one of our senior writers with me. Hi. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry it was a bit lost lost. Perhaps you
Speaker 1: need a way to find yourself. As you can tell,
Speaker 1: this is one of our corny segues directly into the
Speaker 1: podcast topic, which today is all about GPS and the
Speaker 1: games you get to play with them. You know, I
Speaker 1: don't have a GPS, so I've never experience ends this,
Speaker 1: but I think it's fascinating that you would take something
Speaker 1: as I don't know, utilitarian as a GPS device and
Speaker 1: find a way to play a game with it. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and well, I'll talk a little bit about the history
Speaker 1: of GPS and and and kind of how it works.
Speaker 1: Kind of explain how this came about. I mean, the
Speaker 1: fascinating thing about it is it started out as a
Speaker 1: military thing, right, technically cut story, that was a science
Speaker 1: fiction thing. But so an you put it that way,
Speaker 1: I just hey, you know, Arthur C. Clark gotta give
Speaker 1: them props. So um so. Global Positioning System or GPS,
Speaker 1: this is a system that utilizes a kind of location
Speaker 1: um system called three dimensional trilateration. All right, that's a
Speaker 1: fancy way of saying that you determine where your position
Speaker 1: is honest sphere by measuring the distance between you and
Speaker 1: a saddle and several satellites. Usually it's at least three satellites,
Speaker 1: if not more. And by measuring the distance between yourself
Speaker 1: and the satellite, you can figure out where you are
Speaker 1: in pretty specific terms upon that sphere, the sphere of
Speaker 1: course being Earth. Kind of funny how that works, right,
Speaker 1: So yeah, so you're you're you know, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like triangulation, but it's again called trilateration. And uh, the
Speaker 1: way you measure your distance from the satellite is that
Speaker 1: your your GPS receiver sends a signal up and then
Speaker 1: receives a signal back from the satellite. It determines how
Speaker 1: long it took the signal to go out and back,
Speaker 1: and that tells it how far away it is from
Speaker 1: the satellite. But because of course the signal is always
Speaker 1: going to travel at the same speed, right, So by
Speaker 1: doing this multiple times with multiple satellites, you can determine
Speaker 1: your position on the Earth. Um, there's more in there
Speaker 1: that we could talk about. I mean, there's some really
Speaker 1: cool science behind it because obviously a satellite orbiting the Earth,
Speaker 1: it's traveling at a very fast speed as it orbits,
Speaker 1: which means relativity comes into play. You can't just put
Speaker 1: a regular clock on a satellite and expected to stay
Speaker 1: sinked to your clock on Earth. You have to figure
Speaker 1: in relativity. That's cool, do you think it is? And
Speaker 1: it's also cool that it can tell where you are
Speaker 1: from tens of thousands of miles in space because it
Speaker 1: has to stay out at that distance in order to
Speaker 1: keep it SNUS exactly. Yeah, so it's really pretty fascinating.
Speaker 1: It's pretty cool stuff. So anyway, that's technically how the
Speaker 1: GPS works. It's measuring those distances and then determining your location.
Speaker 1: You take a look and most GPS systems now they
Speaker 1: have a map function where it just it shows your
Speaker 1: location on the map, and as you move around your
Speaker 1: your movements are reflected in that map you can see.
Speaker 1: But early GPS systems often what they would do is
Speaker 1: give you coordinates and tell you where you were based.
Speaker 1: You know, you'd have to use coordinates and then refer
Speaker 1: to a physical map to determine where you were. And
Speaker 1: early in the life of GPS systems, it was, as
Speaker 1: Chris mentioned, a military application, and so as a military application,
Speaker 1: the government didn't really want citizens being able to use
Speaker 1: this with any sort of real precision. That's why they
Speaker 1: used selective availability. Yeah, but that's mostly been revoked. At
Speaker 1: one point it was but um ten meters or something
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, what would happen. What would happen is
Speaker 1: the government created these algorithms that would insert artificial errors
Speaker 1: into the signal so that people using a civilian GPS
Speaker 1: system would never be able to tell for sure if
Speaker 1: the coordinates they received were accurately reflecting where they they
Speaker 1: were standing and it was you know, you the closest
Speaker 1: you could determine is around three hundred feet. That was
Speaker 1: about as about as close as you could figure out
Speaker 1: that you would be um. You know, you can never
Speaker 1: be sure. It could be further than that, even depending
Speaker 1: on the errors that were inserted into the signal. But
Speaker 1: in two thousand, the u S revoked this, this policy
Speaker 1: of selective availability, and then it became possible to determine
Speaker 1: your position within you know, six to twenty ft accuracy.
Speaker 1: And now it's pretty good. It's pretty pretty accurate, which
Speaker 1: gave rise to the ability to play games using your GPS.
Speaker 1: And you know, we're not talking football here, We're we're
Speaker 1: talking about well and it's almost like hide and seek
Speaker 1: in some ways. Yeah, or treasure hunting is a treasure
Speaker 1: of looking at it. Um. Yeah. So the biggest game
Speaker 1: that folks player, perhaps the most popular, and the biggest
Speaker 1: is probably the wrong word. Most popular game would be
Speaker 1: geo cashing. Now, geo cashing started when this uh, this
Speaker 1: this fellow out and I believe it was California. As
Speaker 1: soon as selective availability was as soon as that was dismissed,
Speaker 1: He's like, Hey, I have this cool idea. I'll go
Speaker 1: out into the woods. I'll hide a box out there
Speaker 1: with a little prize in it, and I will um,
Speaker 1: I will mark the location. I'll figure out where I'll
Speaker 1: carry GPS is a receiver with me. I will fig
Speaker 1: write down the coordinates for the box. I'll go back,
Speaker 1: upload the coordinates to the web and challenge people to
Speaker 1: try and find it. And I think within the first
Speaker 1: couple of days someone had found it. Um. So even
Speaker 1: this early on, there were enough enthusiasts who were just
Speaker 1: waiting for this opportunity to really kind of play with
Speaker 1: these receivers they had access to, but they didn't. You know,
Speaker 1: of course, with the selective availability, they couldn't really do it.
Speaker 1: Now that it was gone, the sky was the limit,
Speaker 1: and that gave birth to geos cashing, excuse me, And
Speaker 1: so with geo cashing, the general idea is that you
Speaker 1: create a cash or a box of some sort of
Speaker 1: container of some sort um, and you hide it in
Speaker 1: a location. You put some stuff in it. Usually there's
Speaker 1: a log book, um, and there's often some little trinkets
Speaker 1: in there, and you, uh, what you do is you
Speaker 1: you upload the coordinates to a website for geo casher's
Speaker 1: and the geo cashers went, you know, if they're planning
Speaker 1: a trip out, they say, hey, you know, I wanted
Speaker 1: to go hiking along this trail and there are some
Speaker 1: some cashes that are along the trail. Let me see
Speaker 1: how many of them I can find while I'm out there.
Speaker 1: They take the receiver with them, they go hiking, they
Speaker 1: look at the numbers, they try and find the cash.
Speaker 1: If they find it, they signed the log book. They
Speaker 1: can take a trinket, and usually they leave a trinket behind,
Speaker 1: and a lot of geo cashiers have specific things they
Speaker 1: leave behind, so that way you know who's been to
Speaker 1: the box before, sort of like the Pink Panther the
Speaker 1: original movie, right, so you know, you could look down
Speaker 1: and if you see, I don't know, like a smurf,
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, Bill was here, because Bill leave smurfs.
Speaker 1: Or maybe even maybe it wasn't Bill. Maybe it was
Speaker 1: someone who had visited one of Bill's cashes found the
Speaker 1: smurf and then they used that as the one they
Speaker 1: traded off when they found the second cash. And the
Speaker 1: games can get way more complicated than that. You can
Speaker 1: maybe get to the first cash, and when you get there,
Speaker 1: the only thing in it is our our coordinates to
Speaker 1: a second cash. Well, you have to make your way
Speaker 1: to the next one. And the idea here is not
Speaker 1: just that your treasure hunting or walking all over the
Speaker 1: places that you're experiencing the outdoors and and ideally the
Speaker 1: Casher's hide these things in locations that are you know,
Speaker 1: beautiful or or remarkable in some way, so that the
Speaker 1: journey really is part of the enjoyment and the destination
Speaker 1: is part of the enjoyment. It's not just that you
Speaker 1: found the cash. Um. I think there's another one that's
Speaker 1: very similar, geo dashing. Yeah, I've heard of that one too,
Speaker 1: where there's a list of way points and you have
Speaker 1: to uh, it's sort of like a rally, I guess
Speaker 1: in a way, because you have a certain spot that
Speaker 1: you're supposed to go to before you can go to
Speaker 1: the next spot, and the point is to get to
Speaker 1: as many of them as you can, I mean, try
Speaker 1: to get all of them, um. And you have to
Speaker 1: be within a hundred meters or so of each point
Speaker 1: to be able to count that you were there. So
Speaker 1: then in fact, you're supposed to describe your experience. So
Speaker 1: I guess that you're you're proving it's like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: was at the McDonald's on Fifth and Maine, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: to say, okay, yeah, well, obviously you've been to where
Speaker 1: we were supposed you were supposed to go, you know,
Speaker 1: in the list. So that's that's kind of interesting because
Speaker 1: not only are you going to one specific point, but
Speaker 1: you you are supposed to. It is the journey. It
Speaker 1: is going from point to point point B and then
Speaker 1: C and play different lates and you know which way
Speaker 1: is going to be the most efficient, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's another good game. There's a there's a similar
Speaker 1: one called geo Vexilla. Oh yeah, you heard of that one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: involves flags of the world. Yeah. Um, the thing is
Speaker 1: they're they're not really you're not. If you see like
Speaker 1: the Spanish flag, you're not supposed to go to Spain. Um,
Speaker 1: there's a point that's represented by that. So like the
Speaker 1: McDonald's on Fifth and Maine might be the flag of Spain.
Speaker 1: But the trick is the flags disappear, so you're supposed
Speaker 1: to get to each one of them, but for they
Speaker 1: disappear and something else pops up to get credit for
Speaker 1: actually having visited that spot. So not only are there waypoints,
Speaker 1: but the way points come and go and it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it really is race in that case. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have to really pay attention to see when something pops
Speaker 1: up that you can actually make it out to and
Speaker 1: then hopefully when you make it out it's something that
Speaker 1: you you know, it's a flag that you actually needed.
Speaker 1: It's like like I've got eight Union jacks, but I
Speaker 1: need the flag of Portugal. Yeah exactly. Yeah. So that's
Speaker 1: a that's another interesting one, another race oriented. Uh geo game.
Speaker 1: Um have you heard of shutter spot? I have heard
Speaker 1: of shutter spot? This? Uh, this is not so much
Speaker 1: a race type of thing. No, No, this one, this
Speaker 1: one's a puzzle almost. It's in a way geo cashing
Speaker 1: is is very much kind of a puzzle as well.
Speaker 1: And geo cashing, you know, you have the coordinates and
Speaker 1: then you have to find out where those you know,
Speaker 1: you have to find the location that matches those coordinates.
Speaker 1: Shutter spot is the other way around. You. You find
Speaker 1: you're given a picture of a location and you have
Speaker 1: to see if you can find the spot the photographer
Speaker 1: first stood in when he or she took that photo,
Speaker 1: and you then upload those coordinates. Right, So if you
Speaker 1: saw a picture of say Mount Rushmore, you'd have to
Speaker 1: go to Mount Rushmore and look at it and go okay, well,
Speaker 1: obviously the photographer was not standing where I'm standing because
Speaker 1: this is a completely different view. So I need to
Speaker 1: be you know, over to the right, or yards off
Speaker 1: to the right, or a hundred yards off to the left,
Speaker 1: and and yeah, you have to try and use you know,
Speaker 1: I have to match your view to the view of
Speaker 1: the photograph and then consult your GPS receiver and say,
Speaker 1: you know, this is where you were standing in yes
Speaker 1: or no type of thing. Yeah, that's that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a reversal of some of the other games.
Speaker 1: And and what's interesting here is that a lot of
Speaker 1: these games are based on even older games that happened
Speaker 1: before there were GPS receivers available on the consumer market.
Speaker 1: There's a game called letter boxing that is kind of
Speaker 1: the the I would say that the grandfather to geo cashing.
Speaker 1: And in letter boxing, you would use clues and and
Speaker 1: riddles and poems to try and direct people to a
Speaker 1: specific location to find this letter box. And inside the
Speaker 1: letter box would be a log book very much like
Speaker 1: the geo cashing one, and a stamp, and every person
Speaker 1: whose letter boxing would carry their own stamp and stamp
Speaker 1: the log book and then use the log book stamp
Speaker 1: to stamp their own personal log book, so it proves
Speaker 1: that they visited and they have the record of their
Speaker 1: visit in their own log book. But again, you're not
Speaker 1: giving coordinates in this case, you're just giving clues. So
Speaker 1: geo cashing is a little more straightforward usually. I mean
Speaker 1: you can combine the two where, for example, you follow
Speaker 1: the the coordinates that you get from whichever geo cashing
Speaker 1: website you go to, you get there, and the only
Speaker 1: thing there is a clue to something else, so you
Speaker 1: can combine the two games. There's no there's no hard
Speaker 1: and fast rules here. The real point is to create
Speaker 1: a challenging environment and uh and and and have people
Speaker 1: have a little adventures out out outside of their normal
Speaker 1: realm of experience, which is you know, it's definitely there's
Speaker 1: something romantic about that, and there's also something really techy
Speaker 1: about that. Um I don't know about you, Chris, but
Speaker 1: I've met a lot of tech geeks who really are
Speaker 1: like the hopeless romantic type. So this really tends to
Speaker 1: appeal to their sense of adventure. And and I mean
Speaker 1: it's just it's it's a little geeky, a little dorky maybe,
Speaker 1: But you know, I could I wouldn't mind doing it
Speaker 1: for a weekend, you know, go go on a nice
Speaker 1: little hike and see if I can find a cash.
Speaker 1: And they're everywhere. You can check out several different geo
Speaker 1: caashing websites and they're all across the world, the United
Speaker 1: States in particular. It's it's pretty popular. Yeah, and if
Speaker 1: you're if you're thinking about doing this yourself and actual
Speaker 1: lead planting a cash, you need to uh check out.
Speaker 1: There are some sites you should look at, maybe a
Speaker 1: geocashing dot com is one. But there are rules. You
Speaker 1: need to be very careful about where you go even
Speaker 1: while either way, when you're planting a cash or when
Speaker 1: you're going on other people's property, you need to make
Speaker 1: sure that you are aware whether you're on public or
Speaker 1: private property and basically abide by the laws because and
Speaker 1: and and the the wishes of the private property owner.
Speaker 1: If that is, if the cash is in fact on
Speaker 1: somebody's private land, because um, they may say, yeah, sure
Speaker 1: you can. You can put a box in that old
Speaker 1: tree down there by the lake. You know, just as
Speaker 1: long as you're not leaving trash around and and people
Speaker 1: aren't coming over here and you know, stealing my stuff
Speaker 1: and making a mass and polluting and all sorts of things.
Speaker 1: You know, you want to be respectful of other people
Speaker 1: because it is in fact a game, and as soon
Speaker 1: as people abuse that, then you know, you know, everyone
Speaker 1: can um. So there are other rules to live by,
Speaker 1: Like if you are on a Geo cash hunt, you
Speaker 1: want to be careful not to disturb the environment or
Speaker 1: or leave as little an imprint as you possibly can.
Speaker 1: So uh, you know, if you see like, you gotta
Speaker 1: keep in mind that Geo casher's tend to like to
Speaker 1: hide the box that's not just sitting out in plain view.
Speaker 1: But you want to make sure that if you're hiding it,
Speaker 1: don't hide at someplace where people are gonna have to
Speaker 1: destroy part of the environment or to get to it.
Speaker 1: And uh, if you're hunting, keep that in mind that
Speaker 1: it should not be in a place that's gonna make
Speaker 1: you have to you know, break a tree branch or
Speaker 1: or or you know, go rooting around in the underbrush
Speaker 1: or whatever. It should be in some location that would
Speaker 1: cause the least amount of impact on the environment you
Speaker 1: are in. And uh, and keeping going back to the
Speaker 1: getting permission or checking to see what the rules are.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind that we live in a uh, a
Speaker 1: different world than than the year of two thousand. Mean,
Speaker 1: we we live in a world now where if you
Speaker 1: were to walk down the street and see a weird
Speaker 1: box kind of shoved up behind a corner of the building,
Speaker 1: you might be a little you might be worried. And
Speaker 1: there are cases where people who were innocently we're just
Speaker 1: trying to hide a GEO cash have been mistaken for
Speaker 1: trying to hide something like a bomb. And it's you
Speaker 1: obviously don't want that to happen, so do keep that
Speaker 1: in mind. It's it's you know, it's a fun game
Speaker 1: to you, and from your perspective, it's fine, but think
Speaker 1: of it from the person who owns the property or
Speaker 1: law enforcement. It could be something that, you know, if
Speaker 1: they're unfamiliar with it, it could be very worrisome. That's true.
Speaker 1: That's true. And you know, thinking about it, um with
Speaker 1: the recent uh surgeon popularity of smartphones, many of which
Speaker 1: have GPS devices, and then you know, this is the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that more people could get behind simply
Speaker 1: because they'll say, I got this GPS thing and my
Speaker 1: my iPhone or my uh you know, Google Android enabled phone.
Speaker 1: I I don't really use it other than for directions.
Speaker 1: But I've heard of this geo cashing thing here, it's
Speaker 1: possible that more people will get involved with I wouldn't
Speaker 1: be surprised to see geo cashing applications come up where
Speaker 1: you would be able to access UH data live and
Speaker 1: even be able to you know, upload your own find
Speaker 1: as soon as you find it. And I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's a perfect kind of device for that sort of application,
Speaker 1: and because it has not just the GPS capability, but
Speaker 1: of course the phone capability or even WiFi capability. Although
Speaker 1: most of the time you're not going to find a
Speaker 1: cash and a WiFi enabled environment. No, I wouldn't. I
Speaker 1: would imagine that there are urban cashes. There are people
Speaker 1: who hide them in urban places, but those are more rare.
Speaker 1: For one thing, it's harder to get a signal in
Speaker 1: an urban environment from a GPS device um And for another,
Speaker 1: again it tends to give law enforcement officials ulcers. Well,
Speaker 1: this was a pretty good discussion, I think on different
Speaker 1: games you can play with your GPS. But I've got
Speaker 1: another discussion we could talk quickly about about treasure hunting
Speaker 1: in general. But before we get to it, I think
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Speaker 1: places that that you might have some kind of happy experience,
Speaker 1: and it's just kind of an interesting, uh, interesting subject,
Speaker 1: especially considering the games and the GPS and finding yourself
Speaker 1: in different places. Sure, yeah, that's very much that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a good one. Well my suggestion I figure that when
Speaker 1: you use a GPS device in this kind of way,
Speaker 1: you're really kind of expanding your world knowledge. And there's
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Speaker 1: free download. It's a great deal. So getting back to
Speaker 1: treasure hunting now, Well, what I wanted to recommend to
Speaker 1: our listeners is that if you haven't already subscribed to
Speaker 1: Stuff you Missed in History Class, which is one of
Speaker 1: our I guess a sister podcast you could call it,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend it as the lovely and intelligent hosts
Speaker 1: of Jane McGrath and Candice Gibson, and they talk all
Speaker 1: about historical UH scenarios and they answer a lot of questions.
Speaker 1: And one of the ones they did recently was a
Speaker 1: podcast titled could Treasure Hunters have Discovered Nazi Gold? It's
Speaker 1: a very very interesting discussion that they have and uh,
Speaker 1: it really dives into politics and morals and ethics, geography. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's just a great podcast and I highly recommend it.
Speaker 1: Excellent And if you want to learn more about geocashing
Speaker 1: or GPS receivers or even letterboxing, we have all those
Speaker 1: articles uplive right now at how stuff works dot com.
Speaker 1: And we'll talk to you again really soon. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Let us know what you think, send
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