2010-09-17 53 9

This expedition was affected by mtu's Grand GPS Clustermug of 2010.

For his first five geohashes, mtu had the wrong map datum set on his GPS device—namely the Potsdam datum instead of the globally accepted standard, WGS 84—causing him to not visit the actual, canonical hashpoints, but places about 200 m away in SSW-erly direction.

In all cases, the actual hashpoints would have been easily accessible, but were missed by 20–200 m solely due to mtu's ineptitude.

In commemoration of this epic fail,

mtu earned the False Start Consolation Prize

by finding that all of his first 5 geohashes are invalid because the map datum on his GPS was wrongly set to the Potsdam datum instead of the WGS 84 global standard, causing the loss of 13 achievements and approximately 31 hours of lifetime, up to and including the (54, 10) geohash on 2010-11-10.

Accompanying mtu on several expeditions, seamus_d suffered from the same problem, so

seamus_d earned the False Start Consolation Prize

by finding that all of his first 3 geohashes are invalid because the map datum on mtu's GPS was wrongly set to the Potsdam datum instead of the WGS 84 global standard, causing the loss of 7 achievements and approximately 15 hours of lifetime, up to and including the (53, 9) geohash on 2010-10-17.

As a consequence, all achievements formerly claimed for this hash are null and void (except Drag-along achievements). Instead,

mtu and seamus_d earned the Blinded by Science Consolation Prize

by failing to reach the (53, 9) geohash on 2010-09-17 because mtu had set the wrong map datum on his GPS.

Please note that the expedition narrative was written before this became known!

Don't worry!

Location

Geohash located in a nature reserve area about 3 to 4 kilometers south of Handeloh, a one-horse town of about 2,400 inhabitants, luckily and inexplicably featuring a HVV area railroad stop. Apparently also right next to a place called Wehlen, about which there is no information to be found except for the name on the map and the curious fact that the entire place appears to consist of one street.

In short: Right smack bang in the middle of frickin' nowhere.

Participants

mtu
seamus_d
Johannes

Expedition

The Handeloh train station is the outermost of the HVV area in the direction of Soltau, allowing us to get there for free. After almost missing our connection train, and then almost missing our stop, we set out from the empty place we were in for the even more empty place where the hash was.

Our trip was pretty uneventful (except for a scary sounding machine that was cutting trees – who's cutting trees in a natural preserve area, anyway?!), but relaxing and fun. When we got to the hash, we took some pictures, left a note, drank a beer and then headed back. An attempt to live edit the wiki failed due to non-existent network coverage in the area.

We took a different route back, but to our amazement, things looked pretty much the same as they had on the way in. After having passed about eight people on our 11 km trip, we got back to the train station and headed home as happy first-time geohashers.