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.

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.

A screenshot of Google Earth displaying a processed GPX file. Interestingly the text in the box shows fine, but it isn't captured when you save a screenshot. Strange.

There is an Internet calendar available for people to subscribe to that lists upcoming New Zealand event caches. You can subscribe to the calendar at the following URL.

http://www.gps.org.nz/calendar/cacheevents.ics

If you would like to add an item, then visit this topic in the forums to add details for the event.

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.

This is a placeholder page that needs a few more details added to it ;)