I got roped in to travelling to Caboolture to see a friend this afternoon, and it was the first time I actually got the time and incentive to do some on-the-ground OpenStreetMapping done.

Caboolture is one of those awkward areas right on the edge of satellite coverage. The imagery available is skewed terribly, and as such nobody likes tracing the roads and whatnot. It's not much fun having to line them up again at the end.

In any case, I got some nonames, had a sausage roll, and then tried to get some bearings on the railway station.

I'd love to be able to micromap the area, but as it was even my traces were inaccurate. I'm not sure what the problem was because I usually get almost accurate reads, but tonight everything was just wonky. I've only now found out that I can use A-GPS to augment my GPS data over the network, but I've yet to work out how to do that.

It was really an awkward time to be running around. It was dark, I had a load of cash in my wallet that I forgot to put in the bank, and my laptop was in my backpack. A recipe for no end of failure in the dark reaches of Caboolture. I'm glad I didn't get mugged, really.