2007 Fern Geocoin Back

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.

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).

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?

Here is a nifty use of miniature GPS - sports researchers in Australia have been tracking players to determine how far they run. It sounds like the device also contains an accelerometer as they can determine acceleration and deceleration. Sports covered to date include rugby, Aussie rules, soccer and hockey.

CNN's Show and Tell has a video up on their website introducing people to geocaching. It's quite a nice introduction to caching. The direct link is here (note this links directly to the m4v file - you'll need a video player capable of playing MPEG4). Note that it is not streaming, so it has to download the whole file first.

Here are a couple of articles that were posted on the Garmin Blog recently.

Firstly, Garmin appears to be following a number of other technology companies into the realm of setting up their own dedicated retail store. Of course, I expect it will be a long time before we get anything like that here. There is a Garmin press release available here.

Secondly, a tale of a rather hardy GPS unit...

...it was no surprise that the display was nothing but a horizontal straight line; I did not give up. I put the thing in my oven at 200 degrees for 1.5 hours. When I turned it back on...

Police officers in the United States pulled over a guy during a traffic stop, had marijuana in his possession, as well as a GPS. They checked the GPS, found a pile of waypoints, plotted them on Google Earth, went out hunting and found a pile of pot plants. Quite amusing.

According to this article, which interviews Peter Maire - the founder of NavMan, it sounds as if Brunswick have put them on the market again.