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This is a transcript from The Computer Show, presented by Malcolm Russell on 702 Talk Radio and 567MW Cape Talk.
11 August 2001

Malcolm: We're now going to talk to Professor Charles Merry about geocaching. I thought it was something to do with trying to keep material on the Internet and putting in remote storage, but it's not that at all. What is it?

Charles: This is something totally different. It's essentially a very high-tech treasure hunt.

Malcolm: A treasure hunt? How does this work?

Charles: There's a web site called www.geocaching.com and people can post on the web site the geographic co-ordinates of any point anywhere in the world, you can look this up and then you can use a global positioning system (GPS) receiver to actually go and look for these.

Malcolm: Hang on. Does that mean you have to have a GPS to do it in the first place.

Charles: Yes, you do need a little hand-held GPS receiver.

Malcolm: And they're not expensive these days either, are they?

Charles: They're just over R1000.

Malcolm: You can't buy a decent calculator for that these days. All right, so what do you do?

Charles: Well whoever has set up the cache will have hidden, probably under a rock or a bush or something like that, a small sealed plastic bucket with a few toys or trinkets in - a CD, a box of crayons, or a couple of balls. The idea is that you navigate using the GPS receiver until you actually find these. And then you have a choice to take one or more of the toys if you wish, or you can leave them all there, or you can swap out. You can leave something and take something.

Malcolm: It sounds a bit like what I used to do when I was about 13 or 14 and I used to swap comics at the cinema. But it's a hell a lot more high-tech. Where is the fun?

Charles: I think the fun is in the navigating because obviously you have to key in the co-ordinates of the point you're going to and the GPS receiver is updating the position of where you are every second. It will also give you direction and the distance that you need to travel to get to this point. The fun is actually in navigating to get there because obviously the receiver will tell you that you have to go in a straight line. Now this could be somewhere in the middle of a mountain somewhere, or you've got to cross a dam or something of that nature. You have to then find your way around these obstacles so you can't always follow the straight line - you have to use a bit of intelligence and navigate using a raft or in some cases a four-wheel drive vehicle to get to the site.

Malcolm: Okay, so it does have an outdoor application. It can be a hell of lot of fun by the sounds of it. How big is it? Is it really growing that widely?

Charles: Well it started about two years ago in North America and I think they have about 10 000 sites in North America and Europe at the moment. We've got about 20 to 25 sites in South Africa and we only started putting them up in January this year.

Malcolm: That sounds pretty good. How do people get involved and what do they have to do?

Charles: Well they have to have access to a GPS receiver of course and if they want to get involved in setting up a geocache themselves, there are quite detailed instructions on the web site. But basically all one has to do is get yourself a nice sealable container, go and find yourself a suitable site where you want to position this container in an outdoor site somewhere under a tree, under a rock or whatever it might be. Put a few trinkets into the container, use your GPS receiver to get the position of that point and then go back to your computer, log into www.geocaching.com and send them the information about the geocache, which will then appear on the web site. You can also take some digital photographs and put them in to help people to navigate to the site.

Malcolm: Okay, so effectively it's a treasure hunt. Do you have any idea what you're looking for when you're looking for it or is it simply a matter of opening it and getting a bit of a surprise package.

Charles: It depends upon the person who sets up the cache. Sometimes on a web they would post what is there and sometimes they don't. When you get there, besides swapping out or taking whatever trinkets might be there, there is normally a log book and you can log book and you can log with old fashioned paper and pencil that you've been there. But you can also log back to the web site as well and put on information about whether you found it or how difficult it was to find.

Malcolm: All right, it sounds like fun. What's got you involved and what's in it for you?

Charles: Well my interest particularly is that I am in the Department of Geomatics at the university and we use GPS a lot.

Malcolm: I understand that GPS has become extremely accurate.

Charles: Yes, you used to have an accuracy of about 100m but nowadays with the little hand-helds you can get 10m accuracy. We used more sophisticated receiver units which give us about 1cm accuracy.

Malcolm: That's extraordinary when you consider how far these satellites are out in space.

Charles: Yes, they're about 26 000km away.

Malcolm: And you're using about five satellites to centre it.

Charles: Well they have about 27 in orbit but you normally between four and eight would be visible to your receiver at any one time.

Malcolm: If you're serious about going into this thing and you wanted to buy a decent GPS, what make would you choose and what are the features you would look for?

Charles: Well certainly for the hand-held navigation they have a lot of features. One is probably looking at the bottom of the range at around R1200. That will give you the 10m accuracy. The sort of feature one might be looking for is the capability of downloading the data to a PC rather than just viewing it on a screen and there you're looking more at between R2000 and R2500.

Malcolm: Great. Thanks very much for joining us.