FAQ

Many Garmin GPS units have a combination of the letters C, S and X after them. These indicate the following capabilities.

• Colour - that the unit has a colour display
• Sensors - that the unit has sensors such as the bariometric altimeter and electronic compass
• eXtendable - that the unit supports additional memory cards to expand the capacity for maps and other data (note that this only applies to the newer GPSMAP models, and doesn't include some of the older models such as the 12XL)

However, Garmin does not have appear to have used these labels consistently. It is assumed that this is because of marketing and naming reasons.

There are multiple reasons why you may be having problems logging in.

• This site is hosted on two distinct servers and it is very difficult to synchronise user databases across multiple hosted webservers.
• www.gps.org.nz is hosted in New Zealand
• forums.gps.org.nz is hosted in the United States
• We use a number of different open source applications on the website - including Drupal, phpBB, Mediawiki and Gallery2. These serve different purposes, they have different user databases and not all users need to sign up to all applications. Indeed, most people will only need to sign up to the forums, and maybe the main Drupal site if they want to add comments to the articles, post weblinks etc

The website has a number of RSS feeds available.

The main website has two feeds that cover the new articles posted to the front page of the main website. These are accessible by the icons on the Terms and Feeds page. This also has links to other feeds available for the forums and wiki.

20061013: Corrected to reflect new website

Even though some of us have been geocaching since 2000, it was not until 2005 that we had news articles appearing in New Zealand publications about geocaching. Recently these articles have been spotted.

• 20050214 High tech treasure hunting (TVNZ)
• 20050216 High-tech hide-and-seek (Stuff - will be archived soon)
• 20050304 Treasure hunts new GPS craze (NZ Herald)

If you have a difficult issue/situation that you don't feel comfortable raising in the forums, then please contact someone from the committe. You can do this either via the Contact Us page on the website, or through a Personal Message to us on the forums.

We will happily receive issues in confidence, and if necessary raise them as coming from the committee or manage the issue as appropriate and you can maintain anonymity.

There is no official geocaching organisation or website at this point in time, as there is no international organisation or association of geocachers that can grant such official status.

There are geocache directory sites that call themselves official, and whilst they may have a very comprehensive geocache listing services, they cannot claim to be official as there is no organisation to grant official status.

The New Zealand Recreational GPS Society does not claim to be an official geocaching organisation for the reason mentioned above, as well as only being able to represent a subset of geocachers in New Zealand.

There are two websites that provide comprehensive listings of New Zealand geocaches.

• gecaching.com (since Sep 2000)
• geocaching.com.au (since Dec 2004)

There are a number of other sites that list geocaches, but these currently do not have many New Zealand geocaches listed on them.

• NaviCache
• Geocaching at GPSGames

The forums contain a wide range of links to external sites, starting from January 2003. Since those links were posted, many websites have been upgraded, changed or have otherwise disappeared and the link now longer points to the correct page. This is a problem that is mostly beyond our control.

Two sites that deserve more mention: -

• Stuff has a policy of expiring content after a few weeks so they can sell access to their archives. For this reason we recommend not linking to Stuff articles if you can find the content on another site.
• The New Zealand Herald maintains their articles online and is a preferable source for linking to news articles in the forums. Note that recently the Herald has updated their website so old links in the forums will turn up the Herald home page. The article still exists, so you may be able to find it by searching for keywords suggested in the forum posts.

The first geocache in New Zealand was placed by Peter McKellar near Rotorua on the 12th May 2000 - this was in fact the first geocache placed outside of the United States! It was unfortunately trashed before anyone could find it.

Geocache by Peter McKellar (geocaching.com)

The first geocache in the South Island was place by Bob C on the 5th June 2000 southwest of Christchurch. It only had one successful log before being washed away in flooding.

Geocache by Bob C (geocaching.com)

On 1 MAY 2000, President Clinton announced that the US Department of Defence would disable Selective Availability on the Global Positioning System. This meant that civilian (as opposed to military) GPS units would see the error drop from 100's of metres down to around 5m. This meant that overnight a consumer GPS could be used to repeatedly return to the same co-ordinates (previously you could have been a couple of hundred metres out).

Two days later, Dave Ulmer in Oregon, USA went out and placed the first GPS stash - as they were called initially. Dave then went on to post a message to the sci.geo.satellite-nav newsgroup: -