Magic Trig is a puzzle cache (and I’ve got a string of puzzle cache finds going). The puzzle is to find at least 2 and up to 4 satellite micro-caches. Each satellite will contain the distance to the final cache location.
I could only find two of the satellites, and I only looked for three of them. According to the logs of other hunters, satellite 2 went missing because of construction. I couldn’t find the one out in Sycamore Trees Park, even though I looked a couple of times. Still, it is possible to solve this with just two found satellites.
The obvious solution to me is to use a 7.5’ paper map and a compass and draw circles corresponding to the distance. The intersection of the circles marks the location of the final cache. Unfortunately, I don’t have paper maps, and my mapping program doesn’t have the ability to draw calibrated circles.
The cache description suggests using the pythagorean theorem. I tried that for a while, but I have lost the math skills I used to have. I also tried using Excel Solver, but I had trouble at first getting it to converge, and then when it did say it found a solution, it was inconsistent.
In the end, I just used the GPSr to measure distance to each satellite. The circular error was fairly large because the GPSr doesn’t measure with very many significant digits. However, after about 30 minutes of looking and trying to get both distances correct I found the cache.
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