How did you add street names in my hometown without being here? :p.

He he, yeah we kinda stole all your names :p.

I try to leave OSM goodies in caches. Things like printed maps, CDs/USB sticks with pre-compiled Garmin maps etc.

Thanks :).

I've been working on the tracks around Mt. Sugarloaf as well, they're a bit harder though because of the steepness of the terrain. Basically a small group of us have been doing a double car shuffle from West Wallsend.

There are a lot of popular MTB tracks around Killingworth and Awaba as well. The Awaba tracks are where the local MTB group has gotten a state forest permit to do track building. Neither of these are on OSM though...yet.

Well, welcome to OpenStreetMap then :).

Wow, a lot of work has been done between here and the border since I last looked! When I tried to use OSM to find the way to Coolangatta airport last Winter the area had about half the streets marked that it does now.

So yeah, keep it coming :).

Hmm, you've kinda inspired me to bother gathering more names around Newcastle...

Yeah, it's a tricky one...Especially when it comes to routing. I tend to just tag them footways as they tend to be the same width and track condition as trails marked as bushwalks and quite often they are on land that technically shouldn't have anything at all let alone mountain or dirt bikes.

Anyway, I guess the best tagging would be along the lines of "highway=footway, surface=unpaved, bicycle=yes", but it's all a bit of a fudge. Basically if you're using the map you just want to know where the tracks are and possibly which are wider than others (eg highway=track and highway=footway is common to designate firetrail and singletrack).

In the end there's nothing official so it's up to mappers in your area to come to some sort of consensus. Around here a lot of the trails get marked as highway=cycleway surface=unpaved as a lot of trails are mainly used by MTB'ers.

Well Glenrock is basically done, there's probably a few minor downhill singletracks that aren't in there but quite often they're overgrown anyway.

I'll be concentrating on what's close to home but will hopefully move further afield in time. If there are any areas you're interested in I can concentrate on them.

That's what I think we need more of! Once all the streets are done it's the insane level of detail possible with OSM that will set us apart from other map sources.

Welcome to a 21st Century addiction :).

I think most of the map is the result of people being addicted to creating something useful.

Creeks are hard. Short of taking a canoe up one you sort of need to fudge them a bit. Basically wherever there's a creek crossing along a path take note of it with the gps and then kinda just "join the dots". In reality the only places most people will be caring about creek locations are at crossings or where it's obviously visible.

Quite often you just need to get on the ground, makes lots of tracks and take lots of photos then guess the rest.

In terms of the whole node sharing thing: Yes, nodes can be shared between areas. Not sure how to do it in Potlatch as I started with JOSM fairly early on.

Generally speaking when there's a change in landuse share nodes, when bushland (parks etc) border roads I tend to leave a gap, but opinions vary. Generally the renderers will draw roads thick enough that a small gap doesn't show up, and leaving a gap makes selecting just the road or just the landuse area *much* easier.

For areas where you have one thing inside another (such as an island in a lake) you need to use a multipolygon relation. Relations can be rather tricky to get right, particularly because the renderers sometimes don't show things correctly anyway.

Looking at that area brings back memories. I used to live in Epping and went to Epping Boys HS and one time we did running in the bush. Long story short, some guys got lost and ended up in South Turramurra :p. That was before they went and concreted the track around there.

Anyway, have fun mapping :).

On the flipside a traced area is still useful for navigation, and could cause more people to join in as they can see the project's potential.

But yeah, exploring virgin territory is great fun :). At least in Australia there's lots of country towns with only low resolution coverage.

Of course, I'm pro-tracing, since that's how I've mapped my home town so far :p. It makes the map look cool quickly. Especially if you mark bushland, water and landuse on the way through!

I've got a 300D with a 70-300mm zoom lens if I want to photograph far away. I just find that it's too bulky for cycling around with. Also, I don't want to drop a several hundred dollar camera :p.

Thanks for the thoughts though. At least on a pushbike you can always ride up to what you want to remember, in a car the 300D is better.

Yes yes, so we stole a lot of your place names. Or our founding fathers were lazy. Either way it makes googling for region specific things a pain sometimes.

I'd looked you up before, you certainly did a good chunk of the area!

The scout camp road was about 100m off towards the bottom end, so cycled down it to the entrance of the scout camp, after which it becomes private land.

A lot of the trails are difficult due to the sheer number of them. Lots of the intersections have multiple short cut tracks which make for a right mess of a gpx log. Not to worry though.

I've got a Legend HCx which maintains and excellent fix in bushland (not even taking it into the Grand Canyon (near Blackheath in the Blue Mountains) caused it to lose signal...it was pretty inaccurate though).

Was there any reason why you chose highway=cycleway for the wider tracks? I guess they are fairly borderline footway/track but cycleway causes them to render the same as, say, the Fernleigh track which is a significantly better surface. I guess we just need better paved/unpaved rendering.

Anyway, glad to have you make contact. There are so few Australian mappers that it feels like you're all alone most of the time.

For high accuracy loggers you'd be looking at a Garmin "H" (for High sensitivity, like an Etrex Legend HCx) or something with an external antenna. Apparently Sirf III units have good sensitivity too.

As for post processing all you can really do is retrace the same road several times, at different times of day, then guess where the road is by averaging the traces by eye.

I do a lot of cycling around residential areas and find that cycling down both sides of a road gives reasonable accuracy.

Lastly, and most importantly, use your head. If you change lanes and put a dint in a trace don't draw a corner in the road, etc. Often guessing the location for something can be more accurate and more informative than trusting in the GPS 100%.

Oh, and welcome to OSM, enjoy your stay :).

Ahh, problems questioned in diary posts almost gets a faster response than from mailing lists or forums :p. I hadn't bothered doing a forced update yet, but I'd done them 2 weeks ago and thought mapnik would have rendered them. I didn't know that rivers should be drawn in their direction of flow, thanks for that one.

Ahh, problems questioned in diary posts almost gets a faster response than from mailing lists or forums :p. I hadn't bothered doing a forced update yet, but I'd done them 2 weeks ago and thought mapnik would have rendered them. I didn't know that rivers should be drawn in their direction of flow, thanks for that one.

Just to clarify, are you downloading ACTIVE_LOG or saved tracks? Saved tracks have the timestamps stripped, only the active log has them (well, this is the case on my eTrex Legend HCx anyway). So you'd need to download the active track before saving or clearing it.

For future reference I'd recommend getting a GPS that takes an SD card, a 1G SD card can hold ~100 days worth of data at 1 sample/sec and it continues to recored a tracklog even after the active track is full. Oh, and timestamps are included. It's a shame that error estimates aren't though.

If you want to save the tracks on the GPS (ie, to keep the active track clean or to store more data) then robx's suggestion of just using JOSM (main website: http://josm.openstreetmap.de/) is probably the easiest solution.