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Share your Centroid

GlobalRat

By GlobalRat
in South Africa

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GlobalRat

+GlobalRat

Posted
Posted

I was tinkering around with FindStatGen3 3.2.13B macro for GSAK by rutson and lignumaqua when I came across a calculated centroid. Not sure if it is available in earlier versions or how accurate it is, but found it quite interesting nevertheless.

 

I tried to guess what mine would be, and figured it might be somewhere in Angola. It came up as a point a little west of Schuckmannsburg ????.

 

Was only when I zoomed out that I discovered this wasn't too far from Katima Mulilo in the Caprivi strip, Namibia.

 

Thought it would be fun to hear of cachers guesses, and where their centroids are.

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Fish Eagle

+Fish Eagle

Posted
Posted

Gotta try this - sounds like fun :anicute:

 

We guess our centroid to be at Tashinga in the Matusadona Game Reserve on the southern shore of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. This must be one of the greatest places on earth, and one of the most difficult to get to by road, so that's where we'd like it to be........ Let's see :D

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GlobalRat

+GlobalRat

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Hey GB

 

maybe a quick rundown on what a Centroid is and how you would find it out, for some of the people who dont know what it might be.

 

Bats,

 

Centroid (from wiki). Basically it will calculate the geographic centre of all the caches you have found.

 

To calculate, use the referenced GSAK macro on your Finds database. Remember to exclude Locationless caches as these will throw out the result. If you look in the GSAK macro library you will also find two other macros to determine centroids also written by lignumaqua, but I just used the one in FindStatGen3 3.2.13B.

 

If you use the latter, when you execute the macro, select Options. In the reports section, make sure you have Some Numbers as one of your reports as the centroid will appear in this section. It will have a hyperlink to a google map which will show you your centroid.

 

My current centroid

 

It's loaded on my GC profile as well, just look under the Some Numbers section and it provides the same link.

 

So, let us know what your guess is!

Edited by GlobalRat
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Louise_Gerhard

+Louise_Gerhard

Posted
Posted

My centroid is close to Arnot Power Station, more precise waypoint is S 25° 54.932 E 29° 44.106.

 

For a description please try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centroid .

 

I use the centroid in a different way of control. My hometown is Ermelo. I hunt caches to the north, south, east and west of me – all of them in the range of about 200 km.

 

At present the centroid is more or less North West from Ermelo. I try to do balance my cache hunts. I try to do more or less caches in equal directions and distances. Or else it does get boring to go to the same place, same road and the same cache owners. I try to hunt for 10 or more caches at a time. Because my centroid is more or less to the North West it does indicate that it is time to go hunting caches more east and more south or south east or even Swaziland. The centroid will then move more closely to Ermelo. With other words the number of caches and the distances will balance eventually more or less at Ermelo if I balance my cache hunts.

 

If the centroid is shifted a lot from home base it could indicate that this specific person is doing caches overseas. The centroid will move a lot to that direction due to the distance. If a person stays in Midrand and his centroid is in Pretoria, then you safely say that this person prefers Pretoria above Johannesburg. If a person is not doing caches overseas and his centroid is shifted way to the one side you can safely assume that this person is travelling long distances in that direction.

 

There are many other observations you can do with the centroid. For example if a person publishes a new cache you could refer to the centroid of this specific person. If he is staying in Johannesburg and his centroid is in Messina you should be worried if this person want to publish a cache in Colesberg. He is travelling more and more to the North and very little to the south. Cache maintenance should be a problem. He is more north than south.

 

This was in the beginning of my cacher days. Balancing is not going to work from now on. I am planning to do a trip to George very soon. Originally we plan a trip to the Richetersveldt but I need to give a certain cacher competition and George have more caches and on route. Because of the distance and the number of caches in that area the centroid will move completely to the south and it will not be possible to use the centroid to balance my caches when I am back in Ermelo.

 

At the end of the day I believe that most cachers are not concerned about balancing they only use this as a fun tool to see where they end up, nothing wrong with this. Balancing however worked for me as a tool to hunt for caches more or less in all directions and it is more fun to go in all directions. I hope someone will understand centroid now.

 

Gerhard

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amaSoekSoek

+amaSoekSoek

Posted
Posted (edited)

Mine figured out close to where I thought +- ... :huh:

Halfway between Queenstown and Umtata at a dam called Ncora dam.

 

Nice! Wonder it there are any caches in that area...? mmm

 

The macro also reveals something else: Total cache-to-cache distance: 6896 km !!!!

Edited by amaSoekSoek
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Fish Eagle

+Fish Eagle

Posted
Posted

OK, so it took us fuddy-duddies a while to get the fancy macro-thingy to work, but we got there eventually!! :huh:

We guess our centroid to be at Tashinga in the Matusadona Game Reserve on the southern shore of Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. This must be one of the greatest places on earth, and one of the most difficult to get to by road, so that's where we'd like it to be........ Let's see :D

Sadly, not Kariba. Our centroid is about 40kms west of the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana - another cool location which we've visited, and would love to visit again!! :D:huh::)

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Louise_Gerhard

+Louise_Gerhard

Posted
Posted

You are doing well. I see you are heading for 500 finds before 2008/12/07. I admire your 32.4% caching time. One of these days you will no longer be considered as inexperienced.

 

But I do love your FTF’s. :unsure: This is the most finds on one day I have seen. To get 9 in one day is something good. Is this a record or is there someone with more than 9 FTF's on one day?

 

Enjoy your caching days.

 

Gerhard

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Fish Eagle

+Fish Eagle

Posted
Posted

Amazing, our centroid hasn't changed in the last 2 months....

Maybe that's because we haven't found a cache for 2 months? :)

 

Painting, moving house, painting, fixing, painting, renovating, painting, building & painting suck!!

Never want to see a paintbrush again!!

 

Gonna change this weekend - we'll be hunting some cool caches in the mountains with 3 other teams - lekker!!! :D

And trout fishing - also lekker!! :D

 

A few local caches should move our centroid south and east - hoping to get it onto the Mkgadikgadi Pans in Bots - only 40kms away...

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Ding bat

Ding bat

Posted
Posted (edited)

Slightly off topic, but exactly the opposite of a centroid......

 

We are planning to go visit Namaqualand and Cape Town in August/September. This will give me the chance to possibly do the most North Western and South Western caches in South Africa.

 

However I am not sure what would be the most South Western cache in Cape Town. Is there a specific 'geo' formula to work this out?

 

[This is not Ding bat, but rather Anton from DamhuisClan, posting the message. I did not realise I was logged in under my son's account]

Edited by Ding bat
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cincol

+cincol

Posted
Posted

greta pictures who would have thought such beauty in a desert area

 

You would be surprised how beautiful the desert can be. I was pleasantly surprised when I moved here. Although Qatar is very low - the highest point is 103m ASL - it has some lovely nuances, especially in the south in the sand desert where no 2 dunes are the same and the different colours of the sand are beautiful. This is a place that a GPSr was designed for. believe me, you do not want to be out in the desert without one! :unsure:

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CapeDoc

+CapeDoc

Posted
Posted

2 things:

Dumb question number 1: When creating the PQ to put into GSAC, how do you get a large radius....it defaults to 750km when I try?

 

How about a cache at the centroid of the 3000 caches, to commemorate the 3000 cache mark. Where would that be? (Feels like a Blackjack Bailey type question that....)

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GlobalRat

+GlobalRat

Posted
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Posted

2 things:

Dumb question number 1: When creating the PQ to put into GSAC, how do you get a large radius....it defaults to 750km when I try?

 

How about a cache at the centroid of the 3000 caches, to commemorate the 3000 cache mark. Where would that be? (Feels like a Blackjack Bailey type question that....)

 

This thread is about the centroid on your finds, so your PQ would be on finds and this is not limited to radius. You'll find this towards the bottom of the create query page in a separate table titled My Finds, just click on the Add to Queue button.

 

I gather from your question though that you are looking at getting the 3000 odd caches into your database. Firstly you can not do this with with one PQ. They are limited to 500 caches. So strictly speaking you would need 7 PQ's to capture all the data for the currently active caches in SA. It's best to ignore the radius and rather run the PQ's for creation date ranges. To answer your question, the radius is limited to 500 miles.

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GlobalRat

+GlobalRat

Posted
  • Author
Posted (edited)

Glad to oblige, CapeDoc! :P

 

I ran the centroidhynr.gsk makro on my SA database and it returns the following location: S29 04.142 E26 35.075

 

Slightly east of Bloemfontein!

 

Not too far from the country's geographic centroid then.... interesting.

Edited by GlobalRat
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CapeDoc

+CapeDoc

Posted
Posted

Glad to oblige, CapeDoc! :laughing:

 

I ran the centroidhynr.gsk makro on my SA database and it returns the following location: S29 04.142 E26 35.075

 

Slightly east of Bloemfontein!

 

It looks to be in a area of bush, quite near to a dirt road.....come on Bloem cachers, how about a commemorative cache? (Didn't I start a thread on first to hide..?)

 

Finally worked out my centoid. :laughing:

 

Just about all my finds are on the peninsula, or in Hermanus, but just a few other cache finds have pulled my centroid out to the mountains near Tulbach. Nearest cache is a few kms away.

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besem

besem

Posted
Posted

I've been interested in getting a progressive track of the centroid of all my caches found for a while now, but didn't really know how to go about it until I found a centroid thread on the main Forum pages, which I posted to a day or two ago.

 

What sparked the interest was my convoluted start to Geocaching - I heard about and found my first cache while on holiday in Spain. I then returned to my home in Stellenbosch, South Africa to find a few more caches, before going to the Gauteng province for two months to prepare for my study period in the Netherlands, which is where I currently am. The result is a path that starts off by making a loop through southern Africa, homing in on Pretoria and then shooting off across Africa towards the North.

 

The odd thing is that technically, my "home coordinates" are still for Stellenbosch, and my cache centroid has never come closer than 500km to my home coordinates, and probably won't come near it for a long, long time. I return to South Africa in 2009, and by then I expect the centroid to hover around central Africa for the forseeable future.

 

Have a look at the map here. It was plotted by taking the centroid of all my caches for every 10 caches I found. It crossed the equator a few days ago. yay! :rolleyes:

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Urban Hunters

+Urban Hunters

Posted
Posted

We calculated our Centroid using GSAK, but find the results odd. We've done 90+% of our caching between S25 and S27, our "Most Southernly cache found" is at S 34° 19.778, but our Centroid according to GSAK is S 47° 38.850 E 101° 40.670 (which is somewhere in the ocean with no hope of reaching land), we've never even been that far South. Are we missing something?

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besem

besem

Posted
Posted

That's the effect of the handful of caches you've done in the United States. Your centroid, if you ignore the US caches, will probably lie just off the Australian west coast. From that point, the shortest path to the US will (probably) involve going South for a little bit first, then heading back North. So your US caches will pull your centroid along this path, forcing it a little South.

 

We calculated our Centroid using GSAK, but find the results odd. We've done 90+% of our caching between S25 and S27, our "Most Southernly cache found" is at S 34° 19.778, but our Centroid according to GSAK is S 47° 38.850 E 101° 40.670 (which is somewhere in the ocean with no hope of reaching land), we've never even been that far South. Are we missing something?

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GlobalRat

+GlobalRat

Posted
  • Author
Posted

We calculated our Centroid using GSAK, but find the results odd. We've done 90+% of our caching between S25 and S27, our "Most Southernly cache found" is at S 34° 19.778, but our Centroid according to GSAK is S 47° 38.850 E 101° 40.670 (which is somewhere in the ocean with no hope of reaching land), we've never even been that far South. Are we missing something?

 

Does sound odd, will see what I can find out.

 

As an aside, there's a neat new graph on the new version.

 

bearing.jpg

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