2009-03-30 48 12

Mon 30 Mar 2009 in Landshut, Germany: 48.9706130, 12.2250965 geohashing.info google osm bing/os kml crox

In a field south of the "Guggi", a popular recreational lake east of Neutraubling.

dawidi with Tomcat and Hans

It had been a rather sunny day, and I had brought my quadrocopter and related equipment to work. I met Tomcat and Hans outside the IT-Speicher after work, around 17:45, and we cycled to Neutraubling. We bought some pastries to eat at the hash, and cycled on, suspiciously eyeing a dark cloud moving in from the east, accompanied by a cool headwind.

The coordinates were in the field, and since it already had small, delicate crop on it, we decided not to trample the last 50m to the exact spot. I prepared my copter, and rather spontaneously decided to strap my Garmin Vista GPS onto it (for the first time, actually!). That worked rather well, and the extra weight didn't appear to be much of a problem either, so I quickly flew the copter into the field, in the direction of the hash, and straight back when I got uncomfortable with the distance. A look at the GPS revealed that I had covered only about half the distance, so I tried it again, this time in auto-leveling (X-ACC) mode to minimize the danger of pilot errors - and this time, it got to within 3.5 meters of the coordinates (at a displayed accuracy of 4m), so I'll count it as a successful Geohash By Proxy. While the copter was still in the air, a couple of raindrops started falling, and since it isn't at all waterproof (all the circuit boards are unprotected), I immediately stowed it again, without having made use of the onboard video transmission set.

Tracklog: KMZ displayed in Google Maps, direct KMZ download (In Google Earth, if you see a time slider at the top, drag it all the way to the right to see all of the track segments!)

We ate some of the pastries and watched several joggers pass by on the track (and giving us strange looks for obvious reasons). The raindrops didn't turn into anything that could be actually called rain, but I didn't bother unpacking my flying equipment again since the sun was about to set (behind the clouds) and the weather was still rather uncomfortable anyway.

We had noticeable tailwind on the way back, so those 20 km (25 for Tomcat and Hans) were a rather fast and easy ride.

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  dawidi, Hans, Tomcat

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  The hashpoint is 50m into that field.

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  dawidi strapped his GPS to the copter...

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  ... and flew it to the coordinates.

dawidi earned the Geohash by proxy achievement by reaching the (48, 12) geohash on 2009-03-30 using a GPS-carrying X-3D-BL quadrocopter.