Following the Police and Bomb Squad callout centred around a geocache in the middle of Auckland, the NZ Recreational GPS Society would like to clarify some aspects of the event. The geocache container was a small round plastic box containing a logbook and collectable coin, attached to railings by a magnet. It has now been removed by the police. It is not a tracking device as suggested in the media, and it does not contain electronics. It is an inert plastic box.

There are times when stealth used hunting a geocache can be mistaken for suspicious activity or the container mistaken for an unsafe object as has happened on this occasion.

It is unfortunate that a geocache has been mis-interpreted as a potential security risk. Events such as this also serve to remind geocachers that the placement of a geocache should be considerate of security concerns, and the container should not be able to be confused as a security threat.

After a number of years of service, nandor has decided to stop maintaining the NZ Caches website that was hosted on the GPS Society's website. A long time ago there was no easy way to map New Zealand geocaches, so nandor created NZ Caches. Over the years, better mapping functionality - particularly with Google Maps and Google Earth - has removed the need for him to continue to provide this free service with declining usage.

[img_assist|nid=170|title=2007 Fern Geocoin Back|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=200|height=178]

Please ntoe that the 2007 Fern Geocoin has sold out and no more are available.

The 2007 Fern Geocoin is now in production and should arrive in New Zealand within 4 weeks. These coins are trackable on geocaching.com and will have their own icon (which is still being finalised).

Ordering

We are now accepting pre-orders from financial members of the New Zealand Recreational GPS society only.. There is a limit of 10 coins by pre-order per member. To place a pre-order, please Email nzgeocoin (at) gmail.com - this email address will not be manned all the time, but we will check it reguarly. If you have a general enquiry, please contact us in this forum thread.

Update: They should be back soon. They moved the site to a new server/IP address and didn't let me know. I've updated the DNS records and depending on your ISP you should soon be redirected to the forums. This may take up to 24 hours but for most should happen within a few hours from now (20070517 1110 NZST)

It would appear that the forum host has gone down. I've seen a couple of other sites hosted by RealWebHost also disappear off the radar - so I don't think it is something specific to our site, rather the server. Hopefully service will be restored soon.

Here is a cool website where you are able to sign up and upload GPS logs. It is called Magnalox - which is short for magnificent logs. It displays logs using javascript and CSS with a cursor to represent time. You can also add images, text and links to be displayed at certain points in the log. It looks quite nifty!

A space weapons test by China produced a significant amount of orbital space debris that may damage satellites in orbit, including those that provide positioning information.

The Chinese test, carried out on Jan. 11, was at once complex and very simple. The missile hit the satellite with deadly precision. The missile carried no bomb because it didn't need one. The satellite was pulverized by the impact. As of today, Kelso reports that American radar is tracking at least 525 pieces of debris from the collision -- each at least the size of a baseball. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of smaller ones. The pieces are gradually spreading out in a ring around the Earth, creating a vast area where spacecraft face increased danger of being hit. "We've already seen in the range of 500 to 600 events where some piece of debris from this one event was coming within 5 kilometers of some payload," said Kelso.

InfoWorld has a brief article about a new Swiss chip that appears to provide increased sensitivity, as well as utilising sats from both the Navstar and the formative Galileo.

The u-blox 5 chip, which Switzerland's U-blox plans to unveil at the 3GSM World Congress event in Barcelona next month, uses two global navigation satellite services: GPS, which was developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, and Europe's Galileo, the vendor said Wednesday. The technology has a tracking sensitivity of -160 dBm, which enables indoor coverage. The abbreviation dBm represents the power ratio in decibels (dB) with respect to 1 milliwatt (mW).

Shell

I came across a brief report mentioning that WalMart is considering dropping the sale of GPS items from their stores. Some staggering figures are offered with 40% of Walmart GPS sales being returned, and 25% of North American sales. I wonder if people may be having trouble with the technology - perhaps consumer GPS is not yet simple enough to use?