A colleague just resigned to go work on a ground-penetrating radar project to locate unexploded ordnance from an airborne remote-sensing device at 10,000 feet.
A decade ago, this fellow was doing the same work in Columbia. They’d see the cocaine fields from sat photos, then use foliage-penetrating radar to find a trail heading into the jungle from the fields, follow it to the processing area using the radar to see the processing buildings, then let the embassy know so they could do their thing.
Now, there’s more than an order-of-magnitude difference between detecting a building under a tree canopy then and detecting bits of metal under the earth from high in the sky today. Pretty damned impressive, I’d say.
And yeah, that buried tube you thought was hidden? Not so much, pal. Either dig a LOT deeper, or bury it in a junkyard.
If you bury it, you won’t be able to get it when you need it anyway.
Darn it. Where did I put that post hole digger?
Seriously, wouldn’t you have to way above the noise of everyone else to warrant that kind of attention?
When ever you think “now is the time I should be burying my ‘X'” that’s almost always the time you should be using X.
@Kevin and @Chris: yes for most of the States. Here in California, where all newly purchased firearms are registered, one might have an incentive to stash some lawfully (or unlawfully) unregistered firearms somewhere other than with one’s registered firearms. I agree burial isn’t ideal; I’m assuming it is only for extras.
@DaddyBear: true, but I’m also noting the rapid advance in technological capability in just ten years. In another ten, I may very well have that capability for my backyard private drone I buy at Radio Shack. And so would any government agency, private detective, or nosy neighbor with a few hundred bucks to spend. And thus the noise threshold would be lowered commensurate with the ease of ordering a “routine” flyover to check for interesting stuff.
It’s kinda like facial-recognition software: I knew it was coming to the internet several years ago, and I made a conscious decision back then to allow my face to be photographed at shooting events such as Boomershoot and the GBR, knowing full well that in a few years, anybody’d be able to associate those photos with my real name with a couple of clicks. I like my civil rights and I’m proud of supporting them. But if I’d wanted to keep anonymous, I wouldn’t have allowed those photos to be made.
Similarly, if I had some rifles and gear to hide, I don’t think I’d bury ’em today, considering the increasing availability of this technology.
What’s the frequency, David? Unless it’s something pretty darn exotic, it’s more than likely not going to penetrate a significant amount into water. Anyone getting any cache location ideas from that?
Also, do you think they’ll be able to tell a car axle from something not scavenged from the strap pile from 10,000 feet? Because round about the 33rd piece of scrap dig out of America’s public land’s, someone’s going to be discouraged.
And to the naysayers, how about both? How about having a plan b?
I’m just going to have to try and make my underground caches look like naturally occurring formations like tunneling wombats and corpses.
Well, you don’t bury your primary X, or even your backup X. You bury your third and/or fourth X so there’s one out there you can access if your first or second one is taken, lost or damaged.
And you bury next to water/sewer lines that already exist, because then your cache just looks like part of the system. (You are burying stuff in water tight and redundant tubes, right?)
“Sunrise at Coffin Rock” comes to mind