As many of you will know, WildEarth and the landowners of Buffelshoek and Torchwood have been discussing ways to make it possible for WildEarth to also include these properties in our daily broadcasts. Now, finally, this will become a reality!

From the Sunrise Safari on Saturday, WE will be traversing Buffelshoek and Torchwood for a trial period until the end of the year. An important aim of this trial is to see if allowing WildEarth to traverse on Buffelshoek and Torchwood will spread out the sightings more and will reduce the vehicle density on Western Gowrie. (For those who might not know: Western Gowrie is the property on which Djuma’s three lodges are located.) If WildEarth can show that our traversing of Buffelshoek and Torchwood results in a better safari experience for everyone, then we are hopeful that the landowners of these properties will invite us to stay and carry on doing so after the trial ends.

To start off with we will not be able to cover all of Buffelshoek and Torchwood for our broadcasts as that would require a significant investment in the expansion of our receive point network. Behind the scenes, our Tech Team has been working hard on adding the first receive point from an existing mast in the North-Eastern part of Buffelshoek. This will add most of that section to our coverage area, but further range improvements will have to wait until after the end of the trial. As it stands, we expect to be able to cover around half of Torchwood and Buffelshoek between our existing and the newly installed receive points.

The below map gives a rough idea about the areas we expect to be able to go and broadcast from at this time. Light-blue indicates strong signal areas, dark-blue areas where we will normally have signal, but sometime might need to limit ourselves to stationary sightings, and red areas are where we will only sometimes have signal, depending on the weather or season. (Water in the atmosphere or vegetation absorbs significant amounts of signal.) As we start the traversing we will keep fine-tuning this map.

 

 

WE are very excited about this great opportunity and want to thank all the Buffelshoek and Torchwood landowners for their support. We look forward to exploring this new area for the coming months and, hopefully, beyond that.