GS&Dogs

bump c Geoff u not the only 1

Times Square Webcam by Glenn (GC4CE6)

lesss and les n le

Well in SA its commonplace to see our new national flower(the black bag) in many interesting locations, so it definitely does help with the camouflage.

i spy vespax

Take a look at Make Table Mountain Safe. These guys have actually taken talking about the problem to the next level.

At the same time, talking, is not always going to solve the problem and talking will definitely not make it go away. There are so few sacred places left, we have to start defending them. Why not take this topic in a direction where we can maybe get some answers and if not answers at least guidelines for handling such an incident. And NO, firearms are not the answer, at least not in the hands of the public. I firmly believe all suspicious activity should immediately be reported. In doing this we may be crying wolf but at the same time the authorities might just get irritated enough to do something about it. If they do come take a look every now and then, their presence will be noticed by those illegal few. I also don’t understand why in a country where a shortage work is a problem, we cannot have more people patrolling our natural resources. In the case of Silvermine, just imagine having horseback "rangers" patrolling the paths. But again its does not help leaving these things up to politicians and the like, when last have you bumped into Thabo at Muizenberg Cave or helped Hellen Ziller when she slipped on the chain on Lion's Head. Lets try and find some answers not just remorse about what is lost.

dadgum not Silvermine too. This is getting out of control!

Hi pyt22r Did come right with changing the tone?

CONGRATULATIONS Vespax, non-geocacher, newbie. Now you can sit back and smoke a cigar Vespax.

Oh as an aside, we do not generally pick up TB's as we do not like being responsible for other people's "babies". But in order to tally up more miles for Speed Wobble we agreed to retrieve it from Look At the birdie from B&F. Had B&F left it up the east coast somewhere, chances that the TB would make it back to final destination would be much slimmer.

Groundspeak Forums acting up a little today??? Or is it the wonders of third world telecoms???

Speed Wobble now resides in "Kyle's Cache", overlooking a beautiful little vlei with the sound of bird song abound. Reason for cache choice: still relatively new with few visitors and its easily accessible even at night so TB should be picked up soon. Cape Town does not have that many new caches which will be visited soon. Therefore placement is critical.

We are entering a very exciting era in GPSr technology with the advent of our SA maps being available on Symbian phones. As garmap mentioned, this is still only available to nokia users as a bundled package but soon it will be available to most Symbian phones on the market. Think about this - you drive into PE for short holiday, its late, and you very tired after you spend most of your day behind the now common RY/GO's. Where will you eat? Ah you take your cell and click find restaurants - it shows you all the restaurants close to you, Cattlebarron sounds good but u should make a booking, simply click on Call and the next thing you know you making a booking. But where is cattlebarron, click on goto and the unit starts navigating you to cattlebarron. Same applies to where will you sleep. There are however little set backs regarding new technology i.e. battery life of the phone is drastically reduced so maybe taking it on a 2 day hike is going to be a problem. Unless you get yourself 3 extra batteries or one of those nifty solar cell battery chargers. Cell phones don't generally like to be dropped and banged around too much but I suppose they handle it better than the average PDA. Generally your cell has a much higher resolution screen and a better processor than your average handheld GPS. If all you need is to be able to view your cache pages on the web then you cannot go wrong with the nokia or the i-mate. I make pdfs of all the cache pages and send them to my Nokia 6680. They are not live but they contain all the information necassary. In this way you can save a few more trees which in turn promotes more favourable areas for caching[].

Hi Megaben. Take a look at the Garmap Forum. These guys work with the software on a daily basis and tend to be very helpful when you ask them questions.

Would it not be better to place the Cape Town cache on Signal Hill as you will be able to monitor the building progress from above?

OK... what do we have here? Difficulty:5, Terrain:5, Additional Hint: High muggle area!. Lets lock and load cachers. We are going in hot.

Thanks for the input GR. Garmaps forum is actually where this topic stems from as I first asked the question there. I originally tried the support@garmap.co.za route but this was a waste of time for the second time round. The forum seems to be the best bet to get any answers. They have apparently not come accross anything like this before. I decided to ask this question here as there is a large concentration of us going to the same areas using the same equipment. I have noticed this anomalies quite a few times already so if there is a general unit problem more people here should be noticing it too. So far the response indicates that not many people have experienced this, in which case it could very well be a faulty unit or batch related problem. The guys at garmap are steering me to take the unit back to Avnic for testing and possibly replacement. This is a concern to me as it means I will be sitting without a unit for a while. Now if we were in the states there would definatley be a temporary unit for use while testing.

Not only when auto-routing. If I am not mistaken the second time I visited "Where sheep drink wine" I was not routing. The fact that it always happens at the same spot kinda points in the direction that it could be map related.

Hi All. I am trying to determine if my GPSr(GPSmap 60CSX) is faulty or wether there may be some bugs in our SA Streetmaps software. In order to do this I need to ask if anyone else has come accross the following: While driving on the road at S33 59.967 E18 50.721 at more or less this specific point, my GPSr switches off with no warning. At first we thought it was batteries, but on changing the batteries and driving this road again, it switches off again. I tried switching on the GPSr and approaching from the other side but the GPS switched off again. This spot has become known as the twilight zone amongst friends who have no problems with their Garmin 60. I have noticed this anomaly at a few other places in Cape Town and the surrounds. Sunday while driving close to S33 00.742 E18 46.176 my GPSr switched off again. Have any of you had problems with your GPSr switching off for no apparent reason? Thanks in advance.

Congrats to the Rat and Hectic fandamilies on their new arrivals!! May many satelites be replaced in the newbies lives.

A few months ago, a fellow cacher and I attempted a newly placed cache on Signal Hill in Cape Town South Africa. As we approached the cache location we immediately headed for the tell tale pile of rocks. We unpacked the stones to find an amazing, ornately carved stone container. Complementing the cache owner on such a beautiful container we opened it to reveal its strange treasure. Inside the container lay a beautiful little mirror and a bird skeleton. My immediate thought was that we had just stumbled on one or Signal Hill's renowned Satanic hot spots on further reflection we realized that it was just the final resting place for someone’s beloved pet.

Thanks for the wishes - you peeps at the top make a hard act to follow Congrats to colinaly on their first century. One cache at a time is all it takes.

iafrica.com has a weekly email newsletter with loads of interesting "techie" type articles covering most spectrums in life. One of the articles in this weeks edition is X marks the spot Quite an informative intro to Geocaching.

On an otherwise normal day on my way to work in late June last year, I heard Mark Gillman(5fm) ragging people for running around the countryside in search of useless little figurines and toys. Ruben was actually quite intrigued by the sport and attempted to defend its honour. He tried to explain the concept to a very stubborn Mark and all along I am sitting there getting more and more excited about this. As the first song came up, I called S and told her I have found the most incredible sport ever. As soon as I arrived at work GC.com came under scrutinay reseach began on what GPSr to buy. Three weeks later we baught our first (second hand) GPSr and the next day we found our first cache. Ever since, it has taken up most of our free time and we struggle to remember a life before geocaching. We have also met some incredible people through the sport and that has kind of been our "prize". Now the GPSr has become a vital tool which we use whenever we venture into new terrain - be it geocaching or trying to find the nearest petrol station.