Well, with

I've not done anything with GPS before, but I picked up a Nikkon bluetooth doodad from Maplins yesterday on a whim.
Today I strapped it to the handlebars of my bike, with my N800 in my pocket, and went on a little cycle ride. I've been very impressed with it's performance. I'm just now trying to get to grips with JOSM so I can feed back some of these data into the site (any help would be welcome).

Also it's just a thought, but if there were a way to take photos with my nokia and have them automatically geotagged that would be _awesome_.

Mapping went well until now, though there were minor bugs in "Mobile Trail Explorer" (the Software I used to record GPS trails until now). So I decided to change to "GPS Track". After a short test I thougt this would work better. To improve my mapping performance, I took my digital camera with me, also for the first time.

Home again, I found out, that the new software doesn't record timestamps, and without these, my photos have no GPS coordinate attached - they are useless without. And what's more serious, after some minutes the program decided to change the interval of recording, so that the accuracy of my trail was lowered extremely.

Anyway, I was able to map some streets and cycleways arround Wernigerode and Darlingerode (see Map).

On the end of my trail, I was thinking "If I had a voice recorder with me, what could I do with it?" For the last 10 Minutes, I just spoke to myself as if my voice was recorded and imagined what it would be like... While riding my bike I was able to "record" about 10 times more details than I would be able to remember or photograph. From this moment on, I knew I had to get a voice recorder ... or get my mobile phone to record voice and GPS at the same time.

Add Inland Center
Need to fix interchange Orange Show-Autocenter-I-215. Many problems in this area. Downloaded to JOSM.

Since I knew there must be a footway between Wildpark and Landeskrankenhaus in Gerresheim, I went out again and found it. Could even be cycled, if the weather and then the surface is slightly less slippery.

Point to enclosed area. Midway Plaisance.

Covered the neighbourhood east of Gräulingerstraße. This is full of one-way streets, only some of which are open both ways for cyclists. Also covered the area around the church in Gerresheim and made the connection south to the L357.

I am still puzzled by how the GPS works: sometimes it is exact enough to show properly two different tracks when I went up a street and down again. Then again, where I rode around the market place, a nice square, the result looks anything but a square. And sometimes it gets confused and tracks me 50m off the street only to jump back on the street shortly after.

I wonder if overhead electricity for the tram can be a problem.

Got just my very first road drawn, the motorway from Riyadh to Dammam (currently uploading the data with my hopelessly slow internet connection). I'll continue with the road to Doha later on.

Got my problems resolved, thanks to TomH. I'll start mapping the highway between Dammam and Riyadh.

Uploaded tracks from Riyadh to Manama (Bahrain) and Doha (Qatar) and tracks from Al Ain (UAE) to Muscat (Oman) and from Muscat to Fujairah (UAE).

Tried to start using JOSM, but the server seems to give me an error 403 no matter what I try to download or upload. Couldn't find any help for the issue from FAQ or the Beginners help at wiki.

- Fixed all the labels for sub-sectors
- Drew out sub sectors (F-6, G-8 and parts of G-7)
- Labeled landsites(Shakar Parian, Graveyard)

In response to HaraldK's diary post.

Please take a read at the JOSM wiki page, which tells you how to do what you are looking for:

2008-01-05
34.1400 -117.3053
San Bernardino
Fix highway 30-259-215 interchanges and ways. Fix highway 30 westbound links to Waterman Ave. Links connect to E. 30th St.

2008 01-04
Chicago 41.798 -87.589
Add Midway Plaisance, E. 51st St, S. Woodlawn Ave.

2008-01-01
Downloaded JOSM and learned how to use it well enough to add The Point in Chicago. 41.4796 -87.5771

Added measurment plug-in.

Today I improved my Coastline Download Tool. Not it can analyze whether the nodes of a closed loop are arranged clockwise (= lake) or counter-clockwise (= island). All closed loops are considered beeing islands and (if necessary) corrected.
Here it is: http://www.lenz-online.de/divers/osm/

Last A-road in Oxfordshire duly mapped!

osm.wiki/index.php/User:TimSC

http://www.sheerman-chase.org.uk/

This is a strange corner of bush/park between the B7 and Benderstraße. It contains a water reservoir for Düsseldorf and surprisingly many footpaths. I had to stay longer there than expected to track them all.

Recently I learned about the photo-sync capability of JOSM (right click on the GPX-layer). With the clock set properly, it easily add thumbnails to the GPX track, which is quite nice to check out street names.

It makes sense to (a) always make the photo in the direction of travel, because if you (b) make the photo to include even two street signs, you know which applies to which street.

Of course photos are also nice to record the type of road surface or access restrictions or features like playgrounds or shelters or information plaques or you name it.

I note that when I ride a street up and then down that the two tracks really look as if they can make the difference between the two sides. But from the estimated resolution of between 5m and 10m this cannot possibly be. So maybe Garmin put a software fix in that always corrects the points slightly to the right in the direction of travel. Would be easy to check in the UK, though. Except they have the driving side of a country taken into account;-)

Two hours' city walk (Fribourg, Switzerland) of GPS data ruined -- program crashed.

On a more positive note, I mapped all of Basel's (also Switzerland) old town. Only visible in the Osmarender layer for now.

Just came back from my parents in BM, part of the way over the Autobahn A46 and the Theodor-Heuss Brücke in Düsseldorf. While driving I recorded the track and had a chance to compare the path with map. It was obvious that the map has some gross simplifications. Sometimes I swerved away from the line on the map to hit it exactly a few hundred meters later. This looks like they just left out a few points from the path.

At home I loaded the track into JOSM and compared with OSM. According to OSM I drove right on the road all the time:-)

I started to tell friends about OSM. Most of them were wondering "Why would someone need this? We have google Maps!". After a few words about Copyright most of them agreed that OSM is rather important for us all.

One of them (Uwe) instantly started to put in the name and position of his home (Kuxwinkel near Schlagenthin).

An my ohter friend (Alex) even took my GPS device, coupled it with his mobile phone, and went off to map his home village Berßel (not present until that day) which I linked below (maybe visible in the Tiles@home layer only). Impressive work if you consider it was his first day mapping!

He also implemented my idea of a virtual Tiles@home-client, so we could spread OSM even more, because setting up a render client won't be pain anymore. We are currently awaiting an accout. As soon as we got it, we will optimize the virtual client, and you all can start rendering.

There seems to be a cartographer in most of us. I'm looking forward to the future developement of OSM.