Quick note to say great thanks to Christouf and the great turn out at the Grenoble Christmas party last Friday ( osm.wiki/Grenoble#Christmas_Party ) - nill points for me for forgetting camera to record event - DUH!.

Recent visit to Taiz ( Yemen ) earlier this year meant I was able to map a few streets and put the place on the map, but hardly to my satisfaction - I just should have waited for BING - at least my rather noisy GPS data might give some verification to the accuracy of the sat imagery in terms of offset. It is now open season on so many places to add to the map.

Armchair mappers ( for which I count myself this cold winter ) get cracking - summer can't be too far when street surveys of all we see from BING can take place and all that extra data added.

At least with the BING imagery adding to OSM we will know that there are streets still be be tagged and manually surveyed.

This is a winter for the armchair no doubt - Go OSM

Greetings to all

Bri

I am supposed to be going to a wedding, in fact I will go to the wedding, I thought I would carry a day sack with a camera and my Garmin ( well you never know when a quick mapping opportunity might come up, do you )

Downloaded the area in JOSM - converted it to an IMG file using MKGMAP. Out of interest I checked that the map was in the unit correctly and that the hotel I was going to was there. The hotel was there, but listed in the Garmin as a restaurant.

Checking the Josm data, it is indeed listed as tourism > hotel, and amenity > restaurant.

The Garmin has chosen a priority, and not one that I would agree with, I assume most hotels have restaurants.

Just an observation really - dilemma, do you delete the amenity > restaurant so that the place ( which would list itself as a hotel, with a restaurant ), or fix the MKGMAP method of ordering?

Cheers bri

I have been in Johannesburg for about three weeks, part of the huge crew working on televising the World Cup at the International Broadcast Centre at Soccer City.

Johannesburg is pretty well mapped thanks to good aerial imagery, but a little light on street level detail.

Everyone was briefed on security on arrival and strongly discouraged from leaving the hotel putting paid to mapping for the first couple of weeks, our residence being in the heart of downtown close to one of the less salubrious parts of the city.

It couldn't last, and about a week ago I walked out of the gates of the hotel into the heart of Hillbrow, and have been walking daily since taking notes and making corrections as I go.

I have a hunch that the GPS signals here are quite weak ( is that possible ? does the constellation focus more on the Northern hemisphere ? ). I was without my Garmin Legend HCX for one day and took my older Garmin Legend with me, it was essentially useless downtown and the Legend HCX struggles.

It is not straightforward tagging, and I do have doubts about adding some of the hotels I have walked past onto the map, as I am not sure even I would stay there and my standards are quite low! Still I am a mapper, not a hotel reviewer, its all in the data I suppose. and as for the bars, I absolutely have not added most of the drinking holes I have seen, all of them having a handy sign outside indicating that firearms are not allowed within the premises.

It is a little perplexing finding multiple instances of a road name ( Loveday street for example ( osm.org/go/k07vVLxR3- ) ) fairly close to one another - I guess it all to do with the grid system, but it does seem to lack a little imagination, or am I just being very British???

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So what does any decent mapper do when one is working in a new city? Yes you guessed, start checking the map. Vancouver is well mapped, but for a city with a grid there were a large number of short straight roads with tens of nodes which I deemed to be unnecessary ( redundant data ) which I have cleaned up.

And so I have now started adding way points as I pass them on the bus to and from my event site, or as this morning, walking there ( two hours ) . Lots to do and I am just one person, come on team OSM Canada I know you can all do your bit.

On another point can I talk about areas? The whole of the University of British Columbia was and still is tagged as an area - fine no problem, but loading my Garmin HCX with a map derived from an OSM file converted by MKGMAP, it will not allow me to store a way point in a predefined area.

Okay let me explain, if I store the point of exactly where I am that works, but usually I move the pointer to where the data point is, say a post box on the other side of the road, but that is in in an area, so the Garmin says no can do.

My workaround is to store my downloaded OSM and remove the area ( without then uploading ), but I couldn't even store a way point of a golf club building on a golf course. So that is the mild annoyance for today.

cheers bri

Geo Caching in the Dominican Republic.

I had just landed at the airport and taking the cab to my hotel. Stuck my Garmin HCX out of the window for my first decent trace of the day, about 2Km down the road the battery cover flew off, it must have been secured when I changed the batteries.

A fruitless search for it by the side of the road left a rather unusable Garmin Legend HCX - DUH! That was not the worst part of the holiday, but I will not bore you further dear reader.

A call to Garmin UK on Wednesday, and a very helpful chap said, yeah - 'it isn't an accessory that you can buy but I think I have a spare cover in the cupboard'.

The next day I have a new cover free of charge on my doorstep. Top marks Garmin - thanks again from a very happy OSMer

If you want, next time you are passing, the cover is somewhere on the map ( click 'view' )

Bri :)

I was rightly picked up on an errant Post Box reference recently, the post Box outside Bayswater Tube central London. I Cycle past it near every day, I am usually late so have little time to re check my post boxes, so today I did.

Anyway... that is not the point. Looking at the area in JOSM we have examples of recreational parks glued to streets, masking the roads - see Prince's Square just west of Bayswater ( I have not corrected it so it can serve as an example. )
To the West side of this square in the map data we have two roads overlayed over one another with different names.

Again, this is not a big deal and i have not corrected so that it can servce as an example. A street usually does not have two names ( unless there is a former and new name ).

I am not at ease with things glued to other things ( ie streets glued to parks, or rivers glued to boundaries etc ), it doesn't make sense, not in a CAD world or real world for that matter, and i usually unglue them in JOSM . A Boundary would run down the middle of a street, a park neither in a real world or any other is glued to or overlaps a street, they are distinct objects, and thus should be represented as such, especially in an electronic map / representation which has in theory an infinite degree of resolution and detail.

Hopefully i am not being a desperate pedant here, I would be glad if someone could put me straight before I run amok and start 'correcting' things in my style rather than accepted OSM style

cheers bri

Before my trip I had high hopes for distributing cheap GPS units to public transport workers and try to get some decent traces starring out from Kaduna. Sadly that didn't happen mainly due to lack of time, I was actually working there, and while mapping seems to absorb nearly all my free time, it doesn't pay the bills!

So I had about 20 days of traces that I have compiled into two sets of GPX traces with large amounts of clutter removed using GPXEdit via JOSM.

I understand some express concern over editing of traces, but when you leave a garmin HCX on overnight in your hotel room ( several nights after JOSM editing ) and it finds lock, you end up with a rather large GPX traces pointing roughly to your room ( on what looks like a drunken walk ) which is of absolutely no value to anyone!

So 23 Mb down to 5.5Mb. At the end of the day, if users are competent, to edit the public Map directly, they are probably okay to remove excess clutter from their private GPX traces, and uploading 'GPX noise' I would argue is a distraction to future editors, not an asset.

Thanks for all the comments from everyone and assistance while I was there, couldn't answer personally as the internet was dreadful.

Now have to schedule my next trip!

cheers bri

Okay - so I have been a bit busy trying to map kaduna. The ariel imagery was great and little has needed to be added, though I am collecting all my GPX traces for upload on my return to the UK.

What I have been adding is tags, local details, banks, hotels and street names etc.

When I downloaded the Nigeria map for Garmins ( IMG format ) from Cloudmade all the unnamed streets were highlighted in red which was really useful.

This download understandably is only updated weekly and I am currently completing nightly builds of Kaduna OSM, saving that ( from JOSM ) and using MKGMAP to convert to an IMG.

My question is, does anybody have a tool that will allow me to mimic Cloudmade's OSM to IMG tool and highlight streets in Red making my life a bit easier?

cheers bri

I had mapped most of k Kaduna with a lot of help of OSMers out there in July after it came up in high res on yahoo. 3 months later and I am here in person for the FIFA World Cup U17, so a nice opportunity to update street names. That basically means hanging off the back of a motorbike, Garmin HCX in one hand Mobile in the other
screaming around town trying to take the best interpretation of street sign spellings, often only on shop windows and placards.

Updating this data means that I can take the Texas copyright / accreditation of some of the tags, also, some of the street names have been changed since that map was compiled ( usually to ex political leaders! ) . Anyway, might grab an hour now while it is sunny, kickoff at 4pm

bri

Heres the plan...

I Have a contract to go to Nigeria ( once again ) late October. Nigeria really needs mapping - even just the main highways.

Public transport is great and highly efficient. You literally go to the local 'motor park' and there will be a car going to the next main town or exactly where you want to go to. The car waits till it is full and then goes. If you are in a hurry you just pay fo the empty seats.

So far so good, So imagine if I distribute 5 GPS data loggers ( i personally have a Garmin HCX ) to a motor park early one morning and collect them the next day or so, hopefully I should get some good traces of major highways.

The trick will be explaining to the Motor Park supervisors what I am up to and a small fee might be needed

I will be working in 4 or 5 cities in the North so should get a decent opportunity to add some badly needed traces - anyone any suggections on kit GPS loggers - I will likely just sell the kit once it comes back on EBAY - buying 5 HCXs will be costly

All suggestions welcomed

bri

Noticed last week that Kaduna, a town I used to visit frequently while I was a VSO 2003-5 is now in High Res imagery, one of the few Nigerian towns that is

So this last week at work has been rather quiet and guess what i have been doing?

Marking the roads up on Potlatch, then tidying up references and nodes on Josm
which works well for me. I have so say I have nearly reached my limits of endurance and hoping a couple of other Nigeria fans will step up to the mark and help me out. I can only remember one street name, maybe guess at a couple of others.

Just been to Faro Portugal - my folks have a place there and I finally found 3 days to go - well my girlfriend went and demanded I come over pronto, but thats another story.

So what do I do - map it of course - loads to do down in the Algarve - did some unexpected off roading on dirt tracks in the rental car as I attempted to interpret the lousy tourist maps and find the country roads - with some small success.

Only got lost once or three times and drove on the wrong side of the road once
( day 1 ) oops!

'J' is very patient - she will need to be - there is still so much more of the world to map!

Added a bit to Tvededstrand ( Norway ) a couple of weeks ago and spent a few days working and walking Nyon ( Lake Geneva / Lake Leman )

take care - bri

Nyon / Genolier - lots of footpaths added and extra little residential streets and paths etc - took three days off and on and could still do with more work. Beautiful little town for a couple of days and plenty of mapping still to be done on details.

Lots of work to do on Norway - going for a quick visit this week - my host pointed me to

http://www.gulesider.no/kart/

Very impressive mapping of Norway - a handy reference for anyone thinking of heading that way until we get OSM up to scratch there!

Strange how when you buy a new toy, the old one unit you have loved and used and got to know so well quickly goes in to the ' I won't need that again ' drawer.

So I bought a HCX for the ability to cache straight to the micro SD card for days on end, even when caching at 1 second intervals. My old Garmin Legend ( such an improvement on by original orange Etrex ) has been idle for a month.

My HCX was given to a colleague ( thanks Michael ) on Thursday who is going to be doing a bit of driving around Bangladesh. All I showed him was the 'ON' switch and a Car Cigarette adaptor to USB power lead which will power the Garmin so he doesn't even have to worry about batteries.

But I want to walk Dhaka tonight I'm bored, so it took a couple of hours to work out how to upload a map to my old Garmin Legend ( blue ) - easy when you know how - EXPORT an OSM from the web page tab - convert with MKGMAP and upload to the Garmin using MAPUPLOAD.

What was a little odd was that the first two attempts I naturally used JOSM (1607 ) to download a couple of areas, merge these areas into a single layer and save that layer as an OSM to then convert. Didn't work - well not properly. The Garmin would only see the last area downloaded - bit of a puzzle but then JOSM is map editing tool - not a dedicated Import / Export utility - any clues anyone ? Cheers Bri

Dhaka is a big city often with roads or residential streets less than 3m wide which posed a challenge to my trusty Garmin Legend. I had also decided that the 10000 tack point limit was a problem especially if I was giving the unit to inexperienced users to track their long distance road journeys through Bangladesh, the dilemma being leave the unit on Auto and have low waypoint count or leave it logging at a point every 3 to 5 second and have maybe one or two days of capacity.

Bought a new Garming Legend HCX - fitted with a 1GB Micro SD. Initial results promising especially as the unit will log all the track point data to the memory card that you install. This means a day of logging at 3 second sample intervals would take about 2M Byte. Dragging and dropping the GPX file from the memory card to JOSM is easy - you still have to use GPSBabel or equivalent to get your Waypoints which is trivial ( in Windows using the current 221 driver ).

One mild annoyance - the HCX still has a track log of 10000, so you can potentially run out of memory in a day. The Garmin SAVE option will compress your original Trackpoint data to an averaged route, this does NOT affect the GPX file on your memory card so this is an irritation rather than a show stopper. You do wonder why the Garmin could not use the vast memory of the micro SD card to cache or certainly have this as an option ( Garmin ?? )

When logging details in the city I just let the Garmin auto increment the waypoint counter as I log them ( eg street names ) and use my phone's document writer to enter the data - much quicker than trying enter data into the GPS which has no alpha numeric keyboard.

Took me two days to work out how to convert an OSM map in JOSM into the Garmin IMG format - it is easy when you know how ( and this is just one free method of many ).

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My friend and colleague, Engineer Mosaddique, the chief engineer of Channel I television station told me he was heading to his village home on Tuesday. I promptly handed him my Garmin Legend set for 3 second updates.

Mosaddique was very curious to see his house on the map and I was keen to add a little more to Bangladesh's road map. I haven't traveled much lately except to Srimongal ( again! ) and added some more of that in detail.

We have added some country roads west of the Ferry Crossing Daulatdia north of the Dhaka - Jessore road.

Thinking of taking the train down to Chittagong and mapping that with my new Garmin Legend HCX. I bought it really so I could cache for days to the memory card - was just given a 1GB micro SD and am curious to see how long that will last on 3 second sampling.

Will give you a better review of the new toy when I have played with it a bit more..

Bri

A Couple of my colleagues were interested in the range of the Bangladesh Betar
3KW transmitter that re broadcasts BBC World Service material across Dhaka. I tagged along for the day as we drove under my guidance around Dhaka and outlying areas logging as we went.

We drove 36K line of sight north from the TX and reception was still pretty good.

The next day they drove to Mymensingh and Bogra - not yet mapped. A quick lesson to my colleagues on how to turn on my Garmin Legend and two sets of spare batteries later has given us two new trunk roads in Northern Bangladesh.

Thanks to Michel and David

2003 - I had a Garmin eTrex yellow original. Took me a year to work out that it could store tracks - then what to do with them??

Messing about I played with the data downloading the UTM data with ExpertGPS and putting that into Autocad - building up a map over the next two years.

Then Openstreetmap came along - and here was all this old data that I could upload - check out Ado Ekiti - Kabba, Jos - Zaria, Zaria - Kano, - Kano - Bauchi, Kaduna - Abuja - and lots of Abuja - all with the Garmin Etrex.

The Garmin Legend for me is a huge improvement with programmable logging ( I use 3 second samples ) and WAAS - no complaints. Maybe a HCX next time with an SD card to improve the memory from 10000 track points to unlimited

Regards to all the Bangladesh / Nigeria mappers out there

bri

My colleague Sonia was showing her parents around Bangladesh last week. Before she left I gave her my old Garmin Legend and asked here to just switch it on when heading to Sreemongal. I had mapped Dhaka-Sreemongal back in October ( road and Rail ) but I knew there were other link roads.

Luckily Sonia remembered and the batteries held out. 3 samples / second seem to work well for road ( comments please ) and we got a good main route Sylhet - Sreemongal.

Lots more of Bangladesh to map - I am doing my best but am limited to the opportunities that work present which are sadly becoming fewer.

regards to the BD mappers

bri

Bangladesh - Main road added from Daulatudia Ferry ( Western side ) through to Khulna and Barishal - trips I made back in July but it has taken me this long to work out how to use JOSM - looking forward to the server update - now to add some tracks I have of Nigeria that I collected in 03/4/5!