Richard & Beth

quote:Originally posted by Bugz n Elm'r & RoadRunna & Twee-T:No. Unfortunatly, digital terrain is way off in the UK. We lead the world in maps but digitally we are far behind the US (look what you can buy there for $100 and you cry at UK prices). As yet you can't get the 1:25000 in digital unless it is a commercial license :-( I do believe that you can buy digital terrain from the OS for big £££ but only small regions. Thought that would probably be the answer - although the OS do have three flyby's of UK mountains to download from their free section. Have you got anywhere with the Magellan Worldmap Topo? Richard

I was looking through caches near to Beth's parents ranch in Canada, for when we next go visiting, and came across this track log posted showing someones walk to a cache on a Canadian Topographic map. I know that Memory Map has height data, and that there is similar software around for the US, but was wondering if anyone knew of any software that could do the same with UK OS maps? Richard

quote:Originally posted by The Wombles:We were delighted to read of Gary & Jane's marriage, many congratulations. Is this the first UK Geocaching wedding? Not sure if ours back in August 2001 counts as Beth is Canadian, and the legal ceremony took place over there, but we did do some caches on our honeymoon. Our UK ceremony and reception were also held rather close to our only cache at the time, so there were a couple of wedding guests wandering around trying to find it in the dark... Congratulations to Gary and Jane though... Don't think that identical GPS's are the norm, usually a his and hers... Richard

Thanks for taking the trouble to come over here and tell us what is happening in New Zealand. What is the situation for cachers who do not wish to join the society. Are they allowed to place caches on DOC land? Richard

It seems to me that the big difference with New Zealand is in the order things happened. Over there I understand that the DOC came onto the forums and pretty well gave New Zealand cachers an ultimatum - we regard caching as illegal unless you do x, y and z, one of those items being forming a society. Over here the UK admins became aware of the potential problem and to some extent were pre-empting the need for a society, before a national organisation raised the issue. As a result it gave a lot of opportunity for people to disagree on the basis that there wasn't currently a problem in their area, that it was a local Hampshire issue and so on. I believe that the reason New Zealand was comparitively painless was because the majority of people could see that there wasn't really much option. Richard

quote:Originally posted by welch: Was GAGB going to become a listing service? Or since they would (I assume) have had good relations with the UK approvers, used that to insure that at least the gc.com caches conformed? Or something else?? No, we specifically said at the outset that we weren't going to be a listing service. The only way the idea would work is if the UK approvers were on board, and GC.Com/Groundspeak were willing to allow UK caches to be approved according to the agreed guidelines. It has to be said that UK caches were already being approved to a UK variation of the guidelines (see elsewhere for details), following negotiation by the UK admins. Moving on to us helping out new admins and moderators, we certainly will do everything we can to help out anyone who puts their name forward, and I am sure that Tim and June and Moss Trooper will do the same. However at the moment, for obvious reasons people don't seem to be falling over themselves to volunteer. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Ben Pid:I agree with L8 Ed totally. Your jobs as Moderators were seperate and in my opinion were done to a great level and there is no reason to stop doing that. I'm sorry, but I seem to remember that the impartiality of both ourselves, T + J and Moss T was called into question over our handling of GAGB threads. By virtue of the fact that we all strongly pushed something that proved so controversial I don't see how we can be seen to be fair and impartial. quote:You have now put caching in the uk at jepardy....the thing you want to do as much as every one else! if we fold because of it ossry to say but I think its your fault more than the caching community as a whole. A bit of an exageration - the position of UK admin has no real effect on people going out hiding and finding boxes. The US approvers are perfectly capable of approving caches, and cachers are still perfectly capabale of going and finding them. If you seriously think that the lack of UK based admins puts UK geocaching in jeporady then I am sure that Grounded would welcome you or anybody else if you put your money where your mouth is and volunteered. We can't speak for T+J and Moss T, but we have no desire to step back into the job after the events of the last week, and are really looking forward to having more time to actually play the game. If the events of the last week have proved anything, it is that we are not in tune with the feelings of UK cachers, so really we have no place doing the job. Richard

quote:Originally posted by MCL: It seems to me there are two issues and I can't see why they have become entangled. One is the issue of T&J as part of the new GAGB. one can agree or disagree with its existence, and I might understand why they would see some of the things written on here and think it was time to give up. (I happen to disagree with the notion they should give it up, but I could imagine why they might come to that decision) The second is the issue if T&J as moderators on here. For the life of me I can't find any good reason why they should resign from that position, since there seems to be generally no problem with their handling of the forum and the other bits of GC.COM admin they do. Yeah OK occasionally someone takes a pot shot at the admin, but it is not persoanl and is not even usually anything serious either. To our minds the two issues are linked. Up until our resignations, whatever people say about not wanting to be represented, they were represented by the UK admins, to the owners of Geocaching.com - Grounded inc. Latterly we were responsible for all UK cache approvals, and as Tim and June have previously highlighted we negotiated a number variations of the approval rules tailored to UK specific caching. Geocaching in the UK is now getting large enough to register on the radar of many land owners and land managers, as in the New Forest. Tim and June, as discussed elsewhere on the forums negotiated over access to Hapshire land. As the countryside manager who posted to the forum has said, they would prefer to talk to an organisation who can negotiate guidelines, [not hundreds of individual cachers, each wanting to individually negotiate over cache placement]. In essence they were not disagreeing with our current guidelines, just saying that they wanted assurance that these would be followed by having a UK organisation that they could talk to face-to-face, rather than by having to deal with multiple cachers, or a small US based company over the phone. GAGB was an attempt to meet those requirements, hence why it was important that Grounded recognised the organisation. Grounded 'knew' the UK admins who were setting up the organisation, and were already happy to accept the UK specific approval rules, and UK landowners would have someone they were happy to negotiate with, and knew that caches on their lands would be approved to the guidelines they negotiated. With all the postings about not wanting to be represented by an 'imposed' organisation, we felt that since we were doing that already (neither Moss Trooper, or myself and Beth were elected by UK cachers, and even Tim and June were appointed based on the recommendation of a small part of the UK geocaching community) we really had no mandate to continue. We have no wish to have people feel we were imposing ourselves or our opinions on anyone. Therefore we resigned. Regretably we are now in a situation where the UK has NO representation. Grounded will approve caches according to the US guidelines, not the UK variations, and major landowners and managers are left with limited guarentees that their wishes will be met, and the problems of individual negotiations. Whilst many geocachers will I'm sure continue to successfully negotiate on a local level, we are sure there will be many repeats of the situation with the Forestry Commision and the New Forest where caching is banned, or caches removed. I am also quite sure that even with a UK organisation caching would have been banned by some areas, but by having a UK organisation we hoped that many more would be confident in the positive attitudes to the country of geocachers and allow caching on their lands. Richard

Having talked with the other UK admins, and sharing their opinions of recent events, we too have decided to tender our resignations as UK admins. As with Tim and June the final straw was the treatment given to the HCC representative earlier today. We also believe that as the UK admins collectively agreed to put together a UK association, following the reaction we should collectively resign and make way for new blood. May we wish you every success in choosing some new admins. Regards, Richard and Beth

quote:Originally posted by Bugz n Elm'r & RoadRunna & Twee-T:In the GAGB Poll thread we were interested by the said by Tim and June: "Caches at or near a potential terrorist target. If a cache was at a potential target (bridge, dam, etc), it would not be approved, In the UK, these are approved." Based on this statement we are interested to know why a recent micro cache of ours was put on hold because of such a location and had to be moved. Now I'm confused by the policy in general. Any comments? We were the ones to refuse it. I would say that Tim and June's statment about the terrorism rules is not strictly correct. There have been occasions when the rule has been used in the UK, but it is in general not applied as stringently as in the US, mainly because the security situation in the UK is different. In general the rules are applied to major infrastructure, rather than any bridge. In the past microcaches have been removed from Paddington Station, and also from Heathrow Airport, because of the potential problems people wandering around may cause with the security services. In general we consider the significance of the location, and whether people acting suspiciously around the location will cause problems. In the case of your cache it was on a major road bridge, so we requested it to be moved. Hope that explains the reasoning. Regards, Richard

I don't have a Magellan, but from what I can gather from people who do the topographic information is contours at 100m levels, and there is some trade off of road and other information for the topographical information. There is also some debate over the overall accuracy. There are some samples, including one UK example at this Yahoo group. Definitely not OS quality! Richard

We should be there for the last hour or so as we're busy until just after 12 o'clock around here. Richard

quote:Originally posted by nutboy:Is this geocache.uk anything to do with site? Does it have the same caches on it or are there others? In answer to the second bit of the question GeocacheUK doesn't 'list' any caches of it's own. The site has come to an arrangement with and uses data from geocaching.com to produce the various UK specific cache details that are available on the site. As far as I am aware they only take data from Geocaching.com, and not from any of the other listing sites that include UK caches, so they will list the files from there will have the same caches as Geocaching.com However as previously stated aside from the arrangement over the data, GeocacheUK is a privately owned website and not affiliated to Geocaching.com. Hope that clears things up a bit. Richard [This message was edited by Richard & Beth on April 30, 2003 at 03:39 PM.]

quote:Originally posted by Team Paradise:You'll find that ruggedised cases and other such accessories are almost exclusively only availabe for the IPAQ (in the world of PocketPC as opposed to PalmOS) as it has massive market saturation compaired to all the others and therefore these niche products tend only to be produced for the IPAQ. I've just taken a scoot around, there are hard cases for the major PocketPC brands, plus Palms and Psions, but no Sony that I can see. quote:Memory-Map is PC and PocketPC only, as is TomTom Navigator. TomTom do some PalmOS stuff but make no mistake, they are NOT Navigator. Tom-Tom started off with Route Planner and Street Planner (now CityMaps) on the Psion, then did a Palm version, then PocketPC and Nokia. They then went on to develop Navigator, and now Navigator 2 for the PocketPC. I have Street Planner and Route Planner on my Psion, the main areas they are lacking in the Psion version is in integration between the two applications, and also they don't have the automatic route recalculation if you stray from a route. However they both quite happily support GPS, support overlays that allow you to load in all the Geocache locations you like. What suprised me when I looked at Navigator was that the one feature they both have which Navigator lacked is the ability to use vias, which I always find useful if I'm planning to visit a number of caches in sucession - I'm not sure if this has been addressed since but it certainly seemed to be a major ommission. Looking at MemoryMap, on the Psion side there has been an application called RealMaps around for a number of years, although it does involve a bit of work to get OS maps into it the general principle is the same as MemoryMap as it's plotting a GPS location on a raster in memory rather than the vector maps that TomTom and Garmin use. Although I have been tempted by the PocketPC combination in the past, at the moment I am waiting to see what the new Garmin iQue 3600 is like when it comes out as it certainly seems like a more viable option than the current cable tangle needed to power and link a separate GPS and PDA. I have also been put off by the cost in the past, although there are a few features of the navigator/memory map combination that I can't do on the Psion, and it certainly makes things simpler, at the moment I can't really justify the amount of money to buy a suitable PocketPC setup when the Psion still meets all the other needs I have from a PDA. Richard

My nomination is a bit of an old one, but goes to Tim and June for finishing Cluedo before Scotty had finished placing the final cache. He had placed and had approved all the clue caches, but didn't think that anyone would do them so quickly. Tim and June proved him wrong by completing all 6, and finding an empty ammo box, the day after the caches were approved! Richard

As I arrived early for the cache bash I got a chance to take a look at the WAAS/EGNOS stuff on my Vista. I've previously managed to get the 'D's on my display in the UK, however the accuracy always got worse whenever they appeared. However they certainly seem to have done something to the signal recently as I got an accuracy of 2m after sitting with the GPS for a couple of minutes, and a full house of 'D's after waiting for 5 minutes to get all the corections. The best I have ever got, even in North America is 4m. Richard

quote:Originally posted by ukdean: everyone else who started back then has already got it . Nope, not everybody. We're still chugging along in the mid 60's. Richard

You really need to decide whether it is a change to the existing cache or what is essentially a new cache but at a similar location. For example it is quite common for people to correct the co-ordinates of a cache in light of feedback from other cachers, or move the location slightly. The other thing you can do is to change the difficulty of the cache to reflect the increased difficulty caused by the tree cover. In the case of what you've described, with two virtual caches leading to a totally new location for the main cache, it sounds like a bit more than just a tweak of the location. In this situation it would be better to archive the original cache and resubmit it as a new multi-cache. Regards, Richard

quote:Originally posted by jstead:We are far too disparate a group for it to work. It is worth pointing out that the people who use these forums are not representative of all UK geocachers, we just happen to be the largest group of UK geocachers around, hence why the TV company came here. If you compare the general UK stats to these forums you'll see that regular posters here are fairly small in number, and a lot more people just cache without ever posting to the forums. It is also worth remembering that there are also cachers who cache but don't log finds on the site. As Jeremy Irish said in his posting to the Knives thread refered to earlier, Geocaching.com primarily acts as a listing service, and operates policies over which caches it lists. As an additional service it provides forums for discussions. As was said on that thread there is absolutely nothing that Geocaching.com can do to stop someone creating a cache that breaks guidelines, all that can happen is when it is found out it will be archived. But then it could be listed elsewhere on the internet, as a number of caches that were considered to break Geocaching.com guidelines have been and still are. A UK Geocaching society will just be adding another group to all of this, and a whole load more admin. All the same discussions will go on in the society, and it will still be unrepresentative because not everybody will join the society who goes Geocaching, in much the same way that not everybody posts to the forums and so on. In fact I expect it will probably be much the same people who post here who would join such a society, so really I don't see the point! Finally We'd just like to publicly express our support for Tim and June. We know they have done an awful lot, and have gone far beyond what the job description for the role of UK admin and moderator said and we very much appreciate all they have done. However we also know that they have ended up spending a lot of time they should have been spending elsewhere handling Geocaching related matters (the Mod Ant incident springs to mind). Whilst Tim and Junes work gives them the flexibility to do thinks like that, I don't believe that they should have to, and can fully understand and support their decision to pull back and just do the job they were elected to do. Regards, Richard

quote:Originally posted by Zaxx:The ones who aren’t? They are likely to get bored, and will try and sell their GPS on eBay six months on. I hope I am not wrong on this. It's interesting to note that even people regarded as seasoned cachers drop out of the community from time to time. Looking down some of the stats in relation to first and most recent caching trip is quite interesting. As has been said the commitment in terms of time is quite high, so we have had a big gap in our cache finding because our other commitments have needed more time. However I do tend to pop out on lunch breaks and do one or two. (Anyone who wants to place a few caches within 10-15 minutes of Havant would be much appreciated. ) There is also some fluidity between Geocaching and other related pastimes like the Degree Confluence project, Minute War and Geodashing, so people start out with Geocaching, and then find they enjoy one of the related games more and spend time doing that. Regards, Richard

quote:Originally posted by jstead:Who are Richard and Judy? Or should I ask, when are Richard and Judy? They are the couple who used to present 'This Morning' on ITV. They now have their own show on Channel 4 in the afternoon sometime. Richard

quote:Originally posted by Mudplugger:looks like the moderators have already decided it's a good idea (perish the thought it's because they want to appear on the telly) so the rest of us may as well keep our thoughts to ourselves. That is a somewhat unfair comment. As I said in my posting, I have no desire to appear on the show. Also I do not regard it as a good idea, or a bad idea. True the Richard and Judy show would not have been at the top of a list of potential publicity spots. In fact it probably wouldn't have been on most peoples lists at all. Whilst we are well aware that there are strong feelings over publicity, the fact is that they have approached us, as UK geocachers to ask us about our hobby. Since they will more than likely do the item with or without us, we, like the other UK moderators feel that we should be doing our utmost to portray our hobby in a positive light. Look at it this way, what would you prefer, an item where experienced geocachers talk about the hobby and maybe visit some caches, probably placed specifically for the show. Alternatively that a reporter randomly selects a geocache and goes and films themselves finding the cache which could be missing, trashed or whatever? Richard

I am with the other moderators on this. As has been said, they have decided to do the item on the show, so we are looking to give them the help they need. (Short of appearing on the show in our case. Aside from having already done a TV spot on Inside Out, I don't think my street cred can cope with appearing with Richard and Judy! ) To be frank, if we don't help them, they will quite likely find someone who will, and someone who may not portray the hobby in a good light! Richard [This message was edited by Richard & Beth on March 25, 2003 at 06:06 AM.]

quote:Originally posted by The Fellmen:Can anybody tell me if there is a quick way of getting to an old Cache page without having to spend half an hour or so scrolling through almost 1400 listings. It is worth saying that in certain cases the searches won't come up with old/archived caches. In most cases caches are archived but left searchable, however they can also be archived and set unsearchable depending on the reasons for archiving. Regards, Richard

I've just taken a look at Scotty's Word document, and it does seem to be missing some values, comparing it with the information I have in a spreadsheet on my PDA from a couple of the clues (I'm afraid for the second trip to do these we used the back of an envelope so I don't have those clue by clue...) however the numbers don't match up between Scotty's document and those I have. It's probably worth e-mailing Scotty directly about the document problems, but if necessary I do have the complete coordinates for the final cache in my GPS, so if you e-mail me the bits of the co-ordinates you have I can let you have the rest. Regards Richard