mx5cartalk.com

DATE: SATURDAY 24th APRIL
TIME: 1:30pm for a 2:00pm departure
MEETING POINT: John Siganto Reserve, Gawler place (off Reserve Road) Oxenford. NB: this park has a boat ramp so please park on the road facing up the hill, not in the boat car park spots.
DETAILS:
This run took us up the more vertical side of Mt Tamborine and back down the 'goat track' (no, its not dirt but mountain goats would approve!) to Canungra where we made a hard left and wound our way past a winery, alpaca farm, and several narrow passes, up to O'Reillys Rainforest Retreat.

If you have Google Earth installed on your computer, you might be interested in seeing just where we went on the trip, including speeds involved.

I obtained some GPS data from the event from a member who wishes to remain anonymous to protect his, or her, identity just in case there were any speed violations on the trip. From now on I'm going to refer to this person as "RacerX". RacerX of course blames any speed violations on the GPS unit itself because RacerX is a law abiding citizen and would NEVER knowingly commit any speed violations, especially on a club run.

The zipped file can be found at: http://www.4shared.com/file/ETH9ZL7y/20 ... usRun.html

The file was zipped because it's reasonably large.

Here's what to do to view it (assuming you're using Internet Explorer - Firefox will be similar):
1. Make sure that you have Google Earth installe don your computer
2. Click on the following Link: http://www.4shared.com/file/ETH9ZL7y/20 ... usRun.html
3. On this page, click on the "Download Now" button.
4. Click on the "Click here to download this file" link.
5. In the "File Download" pop-up window, click the "Save" button.
6. In the "Save As" popup window, navigate to where you want to save the file to and click the "Save" button.
7. When the file has been saved, a "Download complete" pop-up window is displayed. Click the "Close" button to close it.
8. Using Windows Explorer, navigate to the directory where you saved the zipped file to in Step 6.
9. Double click on the downloaded zip file, "20100424_MtGloriousRun.zip", and unzip it into the same directory. This will create a file called "20100424_MtGloriousRun.kml".
10. Double-click in the 20100424_MtGloriousRun.kml file to see it in Google Earth.

You will initially see on the right hand side what looks to be a "Y" pattern of red and yellow pins with "Up_#" and "Down_#" labels respectively.

The Red/Up pins represent position along the route on the way up the mountain.
The Yellow/Down pins represent position along the route on the way down the mountain.

On the left hand side panels, if you expand the "24Apr2010_MtGloriousRun" label, you can toggle the display of pins and routes on and off using the associated checkboxes.
To simply see the route on the way up, uncheck all boxes in the "24Apr2010_MtGloriousRun" tree except for the "Route" box in the "Up" branch.
If you click on a pin you can see the GPS details recorded at that point.

RacerX forgot to turn the GPS on at the start and consequently the start-off point is missing and the first few positions are "dodgy".

To protect the identity of RacerX, I have terminated RacerX's homeward journey early so that you cannot simply follow RacerX to his, or her, "lair".

Please let me know if this was useful/informative and no, I will not reveal the secret identity of RacerX to anyone.

All persons reading this are advised not to buy a GPS from the manufacturer of RacerX's, as I can assure you we were nowhere near Mt Glorious. In fact we started 70-80 kms to the south and went even southerer, if indeed that is grammatically possible

Lokiel wrote:Please let me know if this was useful/informative

No its not. No offence intended but what exactly is the point of your post, and why this secret squirrel cloak and dagger stuff?
The Qld MX-5 Club has a run almost every weekend, shared among the four local chapters, so are you going to do this GPS exercise every week? I dare say if anyone really wants to know where a run has been they can ask the club for a copy of the day's run sheet, or check out the club website. I was also on the run today and while the run was "Glorious", I concur with Spy that we were nowhere near Mt Glorious.

My apologies, , it was in fact Mt. Tamborine, NOT Mt. Glorious - I still had Mt. Glorious on my mind after driving it last weekend and I posted this when I got home so was tired at the time.

The "point" of my post was purely FYI. I found the Google Earth plot interesting and thought others may too. If it's of no interest to you then I apologise for wasting several minutes of your life reading my post and taking the time to respond to it. Based on your response, I suspect that you did not actually view the Google Earth map.

The "secret squirrell cloak & dagger stuff" was requested due to the fact that speeds are reported and there may have been a few trangressions along the way.

The subject heading has been corrected - file names remain the same (too much hassle to change).

Thanks for putting that up..
I think the boys were ragging you about the secret squirrel stuff...
2 highlights for me were..
Never been there before...What a great piece of road.
And the Se in front (Bov venting around the bends)....and a nice car to boot.

I was curious how high Mt. Tamborine was and after looking at the NMEA log data recorded by the GPS, I realised that it records altitude too and the number of satellites used to gain each fix so I created a new Google Earth map, with the CORRECT name of the mountain, that includes this information.

You can get this new version here: http://www.4shared.com/file/uHp_mxlV/20100424_MtTamborineRun.html

Just click on a pin to see the new information.


As for the other comments above:

Spy v Spy: - I can laugh about my own screwups.

Quicksilver: I asked the question to gauge interest whether or not to do this in future and that was Quicksilver's opinion. If no-one cares for the info then I wont bother in future, "no biggie".

I wasn't poking fun at you Lokiel, it was an honest mistake on your behalf. I was poking fun at the anonymous "RacerX" and their unbelievably bodgy GPS, to see if he or indeed she, may come out of hiding.

We can't have people getting lost in the Hinterland, else we'd have to muster up a search party and spend days out on glorious roads looking for them. We'd much rather get the driving done and relocate ourselves to Dodgy HQ for some stupidly hot wingszzz and maybe the odd sudsy amber fluid.

Sorry Lokiel, my earlier post was an over-reaction. I did in fact follow your Google Earth link. I went home the same way and distictly remember seeing a sign saying Toowoomba or somewhere 160km and like RacerX I also confused it for a 160km speed zone (but with "herself" in the passenger seat, I couldn't take on the challenge) Again, apologies if my earlier post caused offence.

If you thought that run was good, try the one that is set for 9 May.