On Saturday, August 20, 2005, eight intrepid men and their vintage Ferguson tractors started out to cross Austalia’s Simpson Desert. The owner/drivers are farmers, contractors and tradesmen from Swan Hill, Shepparton, Walpeup and Young.

With their support teams, the group intends to take eight days to cross 505km of some of the toughest terrain in Australia, The Simpson Desert.

You can be there whilst they trek to the Birdsville Races by checking in on the Tracking WWW site. http://www.ausgpstracking.com.au/

The trip is the brainchild of team leader Des Devereux, a Swan Hill identity who has for 20 years been a tireless organiser of events to raise money for worthy causes.

During the trip the team hopes to attract an interest by the public to raise money for the National Depression Initiative program called “Beyond Blue”.

If you have GoogleEarth loaded you can also be there by adding http://202.173.135.68/ge/ as a ‘Network Link’ inside the Google Earth application and tell it to update every 15 minutes (More instructions available on http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/teamtrack/googlesetup.html)

Radioactive Networks software is being used in the back end to collect the GPS positions, and show them.

The technical details are described on this site – http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/teamtrack/white.html

And until things are fully operational you can see the snapshots on this link http://www.radio-active.net.au/web/teamtrack/live.html

Darryl

P.S. If you see an image on the screen during the event that should not be there [Like a dialog box] please contact me ASAP…