A couple of months ago, I printed off a couple of the Walking Paper maps of the village of Empress, Alberta. Empress lies across the Alberta & Saskatchewan borders, and is mostly driven by local agriculture and in no way can be considered a "Tech" community. Throughout the day, people trickle into what is now known as "empressive" for a cup of coffee and a chance to chat.

My parents own the building, and one day as I visited them I took the liberty to shanghai their customers into drawing on the walking paper maps I had sitting on the tables. The community is populated with a substantial number of folks in retirement mode, and getting even a couple of them interested in drawing lines on a computer would be nigh on impossible. However, everyone had a great time "inspecting" the paper map to make sure that their neighbors hadn't left them out.

That night I scanned the paper, drew in all the little boxes (reminds me of a theme song....), and poof, the world now has a pretty good map of the village of Empress, Alberta.

I invite you to visit the village, it's a nice place, and people would love to hear how you got there.

Coffee is at 7:00 AM, at "That's Empressive".

I use a Garmin Edge 205 to record tracks from the various surveys that I have done. From trial and error I have learned that even small amounts of interference can reduce the ability of the gps to pinpoint its location. For instance, if its sitting by itself on the sidewalk it can generally zoom in to about +-4m. If its in my hand or I am looming over it, the accuracy drops to +-7m.

However, when the unit is sitting in my car on the passenger seat it can really struggle to accurately pinpoint itself.

Recently I tried mounting gps to the roof of my vehicle and have been rewarded with increased accuracy in my tracks. Tests out in the prairies (no large buildings, trees or stuff like it for miles and miles) have shown highly similar results for intentionally plotted routes. Bringing the GPS inside the car reduces the accuracy markedly.

That said, for most people without windshields that reflect satellite signals, the gps could probably be best placed on the dash.

That is all.