I guess I should clarify quick before someone DOES take offense. I actually have the highest respect for those that are in the military. I was just making a joke that the list of equipment you were using, at the time you were using it, seemed to be military only equipment.
No, it was some of the earliest equipment available to civilians, and I was working for a state agency. Only governmental agecies and large private firms could afford units back then. We had 4. Ours being civilian models were subject to Selective Availablity. SA was a built in safeguard to render civilian models less accurate than their military counterparts. The military units were not affected by SA. SA could be adjusted by the DOD to introduce an error to the already not-so-accurate single units. At one time, SA contributed as much as a 200 meter error to the unit. Didn't matter though, when you use two or more units simulatainiously, the error cancels out during post-processing and has no affect on the solution. The Clinton administration turned off SA years ago. Right afterwards, the sale of smaller handheld units started to skyrocket, and without the distortion of SA, could be relied on to be fairly accurate for everyday use.
I am a surveyor, so we used them to establish positions on the Earth to the sub centimeter level, so the hand held units were pretty much useless for our needs. What I jokingly referred to as "geocaching" was really a crude way to locate old benchmarks. I would scale a position of a needed mark from a USGS quad sheet and convert it to NAD 83 values and try to use my unit to find the mark, well, more to just get close enough to help me find it. That old unit was in the back of my truck because it took a car battery to power it and it travelled in a huge Pelican case. Since SA was still on then, with it's distortion set to "who knows what" on any given day, it made finding those marks easier, but not easy.
So the running joke around my fellow surveyors, whenever geocaching was brought up, would be that I was doing it before anyone called it geocaching.
Funny thing is I really do like geocaching. I thought to OP's Becker "trackable" travel bug is a great idea. I may have to plant a few Becker patches myself.
Take a 9.... Bust a cap... Wait... The other 9.... Bk9
And after the foray.... Ahhhhhhh
Doc
