The cache is not at the posted coordinates. To find the cache, you must first solve the following puzzle:
Welcome to Electrical Engineering 101: Lesson 1: Electromagnetic Communications
Wait, stop, don’t change the channel, it’s not as hard as it sounds … please, stay
Let’s start with something we all know, waves on the water. Plop a pebble in the middle of a pond and you create a wave. As you observe the wave, you see peaks and valleys. Those peaks and valleys are moving away from where the pebble was dropped. You notice the wave has three defining characteristics: an amplitude, the height of the wave; a velocity, how fast the wave moves; and a wavelength, the distance between either two peaks or two valleys of the wave.
Like the waves on the pond, light, which is a part of the greater electromagnetic spectrum which we can see, consists of coupled electric and magnetic fields that travel away from the source at a given velocity: the speed of light of course, it’s in the name. Given the wavelength and velocity, you can define a fourth characteristic, the frequency, which is the number of peaks that cross a point in a particular amount of time. All three are related by the formula:
frequency = velocity/wavelength
When the unit of time is 1 second, the unit of frequency is Hertz, named after the person who proved the existance of electromagnetic waves, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857-1894).
Water Drop Image from Microsoft PowerPoint
Wake up! I saw you dozing off. So, why is this important? We have a medium: electromagnetic waves, that can travel through space at the speed of light! What a powerful tool to harness. Now the tricky part, how do you change (modulate) the waves so they can carry information with them?
AM: Amplitude Modulation. The first method used was amplitude modulation, and can still be found on radio dials to this day. In this method, the information, the most common example is audio, is used to change the amplitude of the electromagnetic waves. On the other end, the receiver detects the amplitude cahnges and “decodes” the information.
FM: Frequency Modulation. Also still found on your radio dial. Instead of changing the amplitude of the electromagnetic wave, the frequency of the wave is changed to represent the information. This one is a little harder to visualize. We spoke earlier of light as being an electromagnetic wave. Each color has a different frequency. So, FM modulation would be akin to changing the color (frequency) of the light being transmitted based on the information. This is the modulation method used in first generation, or 1G, cellular networks. This is also why those networks were not very secure back in the day.
OK, before you doze off again, we will end this session. Below you will find the coordinates to the cache, encoded with 1G modulation (FM). Cache was hidden with permission from Johns Creek Parks and Rec. Please use stealth and replace as found. Happy hunting!
Congratulations to LRHG73 for First to Find!