Today I was in Best Buy looking for something else and saw it was selling the LG Phoenix 4 with 16Gb RAM and Android 7 for $39.99 plus tax (prepaid AT&T but I don’t intend to use airtime). I splurged on it, brought it home, connected to home wifi, installed Mapillary, and on my next road trip will try it as a new dedicated imagery collection device. I cannot really justify spending hundreds of dollars on a GoPro or other pricey dedicated device; my cartography habit has to be kept relatively low cost (I say that having bought a new PC a few years back, the specs of which were calibrated to creating wall maps using Maperitive…)

I also began my first “armchair mapping” of Turkmenistan, working on some imagery collected earlier to update the map, and correcting some errors inserted by novice mappers. I have not yet started a serious examination of the Soviet military maps but that will come.