GPS: What? What?

You have a question, you do? You want to know what tools we used while invading the Quabbin watershed as we did? The watershed with all of the trees and the moose of the eluding of the eyes? You want to know how fine and dandy people like us, from the Nebraskas and the Baltimores, from the Queenses and the Massachusettses, navigated like we did this big, strange space with the busybody birches, the heightly hemlocks and the sorry ruins of the chestnuts of old like it has?

How we came into possession of the technology required to utilize the Global Positioning System (GPS), this is not interesting. There were some kind officers of the peace at the IT, but this is not a good story. In all cases except one case (there was a good-for-nothing), we came to be regularly using GPS receivers. They gave us the connections with the satellites that were orbiting, which helped with the perspective, which was nice. The Garmin eTrex Legend and the Garmin GPSMAP 60Cx, these were the receivers used by us.

We would, upon arriving at the sites we intended to visit, point our receivers toward where there were no trees. It is a great irony that trees and GPS receivers have many problems, considering these were the things to which we most heavily clung in circumstances distressful. It was like Mommies and Daddies fighting when the babies are on fire (that's us, the babies), which is not gangbusters. We would turn on the power if it was necessary, and then forever we would wait, wait, wait if need be for sattelites. We always waited for at least three satellites because nobody - not god, and not the Lebuvitcher Rabbi (Heaven send the Eskimos) - can triangulate with less than three satellites. We would then use the Map Page to receive valuable information, and then we would know things like the relative accuracy of our data, which varied from one time to another, and also the directions we were moving in when were moving along to where we were going.

When we felt like we should, we would go ahead and record a waypoint. The two kinds of receivers disagreed over the best way they should do this. The Legend, it wanted for us to push its thumbstick in all of the time, and then we should have to tell it, "OK!" The fancy 60Cx, it would want us to push the Mark button on its side. It too liked being told, "OK!", which made things ok, because it was less confusing than it could have been, which was nice.

We would do this when the adelgid were seen by us. We would do this when we found where the moose did browse. It did not matter if we should be on mountaintops or in the valleys. It was our favorite time to do this when we found the CFI rods that were what we were looking for during our walking. These rods, they had a way about them, you have never seen such rods. We should pity you a little bit, but no.

These receivers, we would then take them to the college from which we departed and insert their wire parts into the socket parts that fit them on the PCs that we used. The 60Cx, it preferred USB. The Legend, that's not what it wanted. We would then open the program that was EasyGPS, and we would click with our mouses on Add GPS, and then we would find the GPS we were using, and many times click "OK". We would then click, in the menu "GPS," "Receive from GPS," and through the process things would appear, mostly our waypoints and our tracks and such. We would save those things with the save button. Then we would convert the file using EGPS2shp, which is not hard. And then we would use the ArcCatalog to inform this new shape file with knowledge of what it was talking about by associating through clicking with the coordinate system that was WGS 1984.prj. We would then transpose our data over maps with the ArcMaps, or use it to chart things, such as the presence of moose, which was nice.

GPS was good to us. And this was our primary field tool that helped us. Our vans were nice also.