GlobalRat

I can but only agree with Warthog. While we need more caches, we should also ensure that the caches are interesting and a pleasure to find. JHB can certainly do with a number of virtual caches (unfortunately there is a moratorium) as there are many interesting places where a physical cache will not survive.... however, let's get those creative Saffer juices flowing, I'm sure we can come up with some nifty solutions BTW: Warthog, if you're looking for a puzzle cache, try out my Reporters Riddle series I also have a puzzle series planned for 2005 consisting of 4 caches. Coming to a piece of veld near you soon.....

It seems that everything in South Africa is prospering. Let’s make 2005 a massive year for Geocaching. I’d like to extend the challenge to all cachers in South Africa to make 2005 a prosperous year for Geocaching. Let’s see if we can top 100 new active caches for the year, and I’d like to set the goal at +150. Here are some stats of active caches at the end of 2004. Caches placed 2001 – 43 2002 – 65 2003 – 82 2004 – 88 Of the 278 currently active caches, there are about 15 which should probably be archived. Caches per province: EC – 34 FS – 10 GP – 39 KZN – 31 (Good job, 21 new caches in 2004) MP – 12 NC – 14 NP – 7 NW – 11 WC - 120 The challenge is for each province to get active and place more caches so that we can grow the sport. I also urge cachers to archive those dead caches. On a number of occasions I’ve taken newbies out cache hunting only to discover the cache is missing, and the cache owner is non-responsive. This is a huge disappointment not only for me, but more so for newbies who may well lose interest on what to them will appear as a dying sport. There are no prizes here! Just pride!! I’ll set up a website shortly with some more basic stats. In Gauteng, a number of us have set our own goals for the year, and made a deal on how we can increase the caches in our province. GP cachers can contact me directly to get in on the deal! Challenge Start date: 2005-01-01 Challenge End date: 2005-12-31 The more caches, the more cachers, the bigger the sport.

I think you can create routes in VEZA and upload those. Definitely don't bother with Mapsource maps for SA. They're pretty mediocre in coverage, only really cover the major centres. Just checked the garden route area, and it really only has the major roads and the odd side street. The package is expensive and does not compare to the Europe version which has just about every jeep track loaded. On the upside, there is a local company that has been granted a license by Garmin, and they should be shipping a new version this year, which promises to have every little track loaded and autoroutable....can't wait. Bottom line, don't bother trying to load up the city select.... it may help you in Somerset West and Cape Town, but beyond that..... just get a good atlas that has coord info on it.

zTHUNDERZ Only picked up this thread now..... Did you have any response to your request offline.... seems as if there are no cachers left in JHB looking at the activity on existing caches and the lack of new ones

There can never be too many caches. As an example, where I lived in the UK, if I did a search on all nearby caches I would get 250 hits. That was two years ago. If I do the same search now, it hits 2600 odd caches. There's no point in tiresome useless caches, but Pretoria/JHB has the potential for many more caches, so go ahead and place some so that the rest of us have something to do after a hard day at the office which doesn't require a weekend trek to find a cache in MP, or FS, or KZN or NW or........ BTW, Groundspeaks rule of thumb is that a cache may not be closer than 0.1mi to another cache....

I'm with Warthog on this one. While I don't think the volume of caches in SA currently makes it justifiable, I'd like to see the provinces listed at some stage....perhaps one day when we hit 1000 caches.....sigh . About a month ago I spent quite some time putting together a spreadsheet of SA caches and sourcing the province for each. As I travel around a bit, it's nice to be able to get a list of caches in a province.

There are 1:20000 paper maps available in most of the outdoor shops, or from www.themaps.co.za. I suggest you pick up one of these regardless of having the info in your GPS. It's unwise to do extensive hiking and solely rely on ones GPS. 1:50000 scale is also to small for hiking purposes. I, have GPS tracks of most of the paths in Silvermine West and East if you are interested. They are currently in Mapsource and text format but I can export them for Ozi Explorer. You can email me if interested.

Did the same as Africard. You can purchase from Groundspeak in Europe who will ship to SA.

Divide the seconds by 60 and you have decimal degrees, i.e 25 minutes and 30 seconds becomes 25.500 in decimal degrees.

I was disconcerted on a recent trip to Cape Town to find so many caches in disrepair . It seems that cache owners are not to bothered to keep their caches in good order. Numerous caches have been found missing and a number of cachers have requested that the cache be archived. Some of these date back over a year with no response from the cache owner. While I'm not stupid enough to go climbing after a cache that has been missing for a year, I find it too be an unhappy situation that cache owners have not made the effort to either archive, disable, or make a note regarding their caches. I have also recently come across numerous caches which report to contain TB, yet it is clear from the logs that these bugs have been removed, yet the cacher has not logged the move properly. While this is the cachers error or inexperience with TB's, I feel that it is the owners responsibility to urge these cachers to rectify their logs. Similarly there are numerous logs where cachers have entered the TB's id number in their logs. These logs should be removed as this id is the only sure way of making sure that someone actually finds a bug, and shouldn't be logged for all to see, it is the bugs secure ID. Once again, cache owners should delete these logs, and request cachers to resubmit and direct them to the 'How to' regarding TB's on the geocaching and Groundspeak sites. Lets keep our caches in good order!!

I was disconcerted on a recent trip to Cape Town to find so many caches in disrepair . It seems that cache owners are not to bothered to keep their caches in good order. Numerous caches have been found missing and a number of cachers have requested that the cache be archived. Some of these date back over a year with no response from the cache owner. While I'm not stupid enough to go climbing after a cache that has been missing for a year, I find it too be an unhappy situation that cache owners have not made the effort to either archive, disable, or make a note regarding their caches. I have also recently come across numerous caches which report to contain TB, yet it is clear from the logs that these bugs have been removed, yet the cacher has not logged the move properly. While this is the cachers error or inexperience with TB's, I feel that it is the owners responsibility to urge these cachers to rectify their logs. Similarly there are numerous logs where cachers have entered the TB's id number in their logs. These logs should be removed as this id is the only sure way of making sure that someone actually finds a bug, and shouldn't be logged for all to see, it is the bugs secure ID. Once again, cache owners should delete these logs, and request cachers to resubmit and direct them to the 'How to' regarding TB's on the geocaching and Groundspeak sites. Lets keep our caches in good order!!

Jors, this may be of interest From the director of surveys site: Points are allocated unique geographical co-ordinates. These are latitude, longitude and height. The height could be either orthometric (above the geoid (defined as mean sea level)) or above the surface of the reference spheroid (ellipsoidal height). In order to map these co-ordinates, they need to be projected onto the plane. In South Africa we use the Gauss-conform projection. The projection effectively projects the latitude and longitude coordinates onto a surface referenced by a particular longitude and the equator. The South African system is defined in belts of two degrees in longitude. Every odd meridian is the central meridian of reference (simply referred to as that "Lo" or Longitude of origin). The Lo.s are 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29 and 31. Each two degree belt is therefore flattened with reference to that Lo. (ie. Lo.19 has a flat surface representing the area between 18 degrees east and 20 degrees east) The projected co-ordinates are referred to two axes being Y, east/west, and X, north/south. The Y co-ordinate is positive west of the Lo., zero on that Lo. and negative east of that Lo. The X co-ordinate is positive south of the equator and zero on the equator. It is therefore obvious that projected co-ordinates will represent a degree of distortion relative to the distance that co-ordinate is away from its Lo. as they are plane representations of a curved surface. There is no distortion on the Lo. For this reason, the South African system is restricted to two degree belts. Note: The South African system closely resembles the UTM system. The UTM system in the Southern Hemisphere has a false northing at the equator being 10,000,000 metres and decreases southwards, and a false easting of 500,000 metres on the Lo. increasing eastwards. This system consists of six degree belts centred on a Lo. and these belts are referenced with zone numbers. Zone 33 covers Longitude 12 to Longitude 18 and is centred on Lo.15. The following simple conversion is applicable only where the Lo. of the South African system and the central meridian of the UTM system coincide ie. 15ºE 21ºE 27ºE and 33ºE Y(Lo.)=(500 000-E(UTM))/0.9996 X(Lo.)=(10 000 000-N(UTM))/0.9996 The UTM system incorporates a scale distortion of 0.9996 at the Lo. to reduce distortion at the edges of the belt. GlobalRat

Nope. Use the Groundspeak link. You'll be routed to a company in the UK from which you'll need to purchase as the US does not ship outside of the americas. Your best option is to send them to a mate in the US who can post them on. The UK company asks a tidy profit on the bugs GlobalRat

I've used the MapSource products extensively over the last 3 years. I can tell you that they are brilliant for driving around, and depending on your GPSR the software is extremely informative. I even ended up driving through Portugal, watching my GPS instead of the road, as there were no markers on the road indicating hairpin bends on precipitious mountain passes. As for the South African edition. I found it very disappointing. My disappointment was related to the price of the product against the price of the european product which is much more detailed and extensive, covering all of europe in minute detail. The SA edition only covers major cities. Having said this, the market in SA for such products is currently quite small, therefore higher prices. While all the digital information is out there, there is a great expense in mapping these maps and test driving them. I've converted some of my own maps, and believe me it takes an age. As for mapsource and etrex. The etrex has no mapping functionality, you can only create routes and upload these, i.e. no autorouting etc. I use a GPS V. Can not comment much on the Garmap software, however when I last visited there site, the offering was much the same as Mapsource. However, mapsource is more suited to my GPSR with autorouting etc. GlobalRat

Global_Viking Thanks for referring me to this discussion. I've long been thinking of trying to establish a benchmark hunt in SA. I acquired a list of SA benchmarks from the directorate some time ago, however they publish their coordinates in a XY format and I've never got round to purchasing the transformation software to get it into DD MM.MMM format. Although I was not planning to restrict the efforts to the 30th, I think this would be an excellent start, and will hopefully boost the sport in SA. Will only be too happy to assist in the effort. GlobalRat