Its gone!

Getting a lot of :

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Finally completed tracing the Strood Community Trail located in the Strood area of Medway, Kent which can be seen at osm.org/?relation=1273060. I had started this in mid November in the hope to complete for the launch of the trail on the 11th Dec 2010 but the snow halted progress.
A leaflet giving the route only appeared on the Valley of Visions (the organisation promoting the trails) website yesterday.

This one of 7 such trails being or have been established to encourage local people to explore their area in which they live.

The following links give more detail of the project if you are interested

http://stroodcommunitytrail.blogspot.com/

http://www.valleyofvisions.org.uk/Stroodcommunity.php

I've been using Bing imagery quite a lot recently, but I have come to learn its limitations fairly quickly.

I love it for:

+ Verification/improvement of stuff I've done previously.
+ Doing some quite effective mapping just by making mental notes of things while out & about without my GPS and using the imagery to pinpoint these things

I hate it for:

- These pesky dark shadows that obscure building outlines etc
- Where the imagery is way out of date. This introducing a lot of errors where stuff is being mapped but simply don't exist anymore because the image is a year or more out of date. The area I tend to cover is part of the Thames Gateway which is undergoing a lot of change where huge sites are being cleared to make way for new development. Mapping construction sites from Bing is a big no-no.
- Image quirks such as weird wonky angle that distort outlines badly and photo tiles that are just in the wrong place! Just east of Isle of Grain Kent you will find two identical tiles next to each other!

So temper that enthusiasm to map from Bing with a little commonsense otherwise we will have tons of these red bugs eating our map

Anybody got there love/hates?

I've done quite a few building outlines tonight utilising Bing imagery in P2.
However on more than one occasion, saves were not happening (according to the dialogue box), so I cancelled after a few minutes of waiting. At one point I cancelled twice before eventually getting a save completed indication after a third attempt. Going back to tag the building later in P1, I got flashing red nodes indicating dupe nodes. I found that building outlines had in fact been drawn 3 times over the top of each other. So the database was getting the info on each save but the P2 editor at my end was not getting confirmation that the data was being saved. My experience of P2 to date is that I get hit with random bugs with no pattern to them, which to me seems to be some sort of connectivity problem between the editor in the web browser and the server that stores the data

Snow stopped my planned trip today, but a slight upside was with all the schools closures, there are currently long lists of school names of all different types (public, private, adult etc) on local radio websites which I think could be a useful checklist for the OSM mapper.

Also I had a first look at Bing imagery for my area, which from looking to see what is on it and what is not, I estimate the image about a year old for my area. It confirmed my Garmin Vista is pretty spot on accuracy wise, but my navman is not so good

I had a few minutes spare this afternoon before meeting someone, so with GPS in hand off I went to collect more house numbers (I use the waypoints on the Garmin Vista to pin down location), unfortunately a deep low going through the UK at the moment hit me sideways very hard after a few minutes, had trouble setting the last waypoint because the Garmin's screen was so wet! I can confirm the Vista survives a good soaking! After a "this is getting silly" moment I gave up and ran for cover.

Found the oscompare.raggedred.net site useful in flagging errors in my area but does not get it 100% right so had to survey while on a farm visit in the area, but is still a very useful tool.
Cleared quite a few errors in Hoo St Werburg area but still quite a few to do

Done a bit of clean up of A2 route through Chatham. There were 2 routes showing, however the route through the high streets is an historic one, the current route goes via Star Hill/New road. Also removed dual carriage ways in places where there isn't one.

Had a big clear-out of old paperwork today and realised a lot of bills/receipts have address info on them, so I have been making use of them before being thrown away to add a load of addr: tags to places on the map or adding new ones. Tagging the resource as source=local_knowledge. Never cross my mind to do this before

Yesterday I was out by Cliffe Fort walking along the Saxon Shore Way with my Garmin for a GPS trace. I noticed that on the Garmin display it showed that I was well into the River Thames at some points along the way, so I would not be too confident about the accuracy of the map that comes with the Garmin Vista where coastline is concerned. This not the first time this has happened. All was well when I uploaded the trace to OSM, ie. I was on land most of the time!

The Saxon Shore Way path seems to be under attack from coastal/river erosion in this area so I am not sure how long this path will last into the future. Added a few more kilometers to the LDP (relation 8864), only another 200 km to go!!!!

I was doing an update earlier in potlatch and it was taking for ever to respond, however I noticed later in the changesets that a bot was running at the time, I thinking bots should be run over night when it's quite, then I realised where the bot is maybe night time, oh well, perhaps bots should pace themselves in some way so not to overload the system

Just got through my first set of batteries on my new toy. I must admit they lasted longer than I thought. I think this is due to the display being pretty clear in all sorts of light conditions and I hardly need to use the backlight function, a lot less than I thought I would when I first got the unit.

My only gripe with it is when I try to enter a waypoint where you press and hold the rocker key on the front of the unit, it does not always register, so you have to have several goes at it. Perhaps its just me with my big fingers and thumbs!

Been GPS tracing/mapping a lots "paths" in my area. This can get a bit confusing at times both in terms of 1. Paths not being signed/waymarked very well, farmers ploughing up footpaths and sign vandalism don't help. 2. Can't decide the best way to tag paths at the moment. I know that there 2 schools of thought on this, but both seem to have merit depending on your perception of things.

Added roads which no other map shows because they so new. Just shows the power of OSM!

I was out today GPS tracing some paths trying out my new Garmin Vista, when I came across a herd of cows across the path which had a ditch both sides and the cows weren't going to move! Comeback another day I suppose. Anybody else had odd things stop you mapping?

Just recently got hold of a Garmin Etrex Vista HCx. seems to work OK just need to get use to it. I suspect it will eat batteries, so rechargeables are on the shopping list along with a microsd chip. Have done footpath traces around Cliffe/Cliffe Woods area which came out ok. Had to update the mapsource s/w twice to bring it up to date (ver 6.16.2) would have thought it would have gone to the latest version in one go.

Time does fly!

Its been some two years since my last upload of GPS data. Nice to see OSM is maturing with more info and better features.

Not been on OSM for some time

Like the development that has taken place on potlatch lot more user friendly

Updated some features in my local area like BT taking phone boxes away!!

Some of the areas have been mapped out remotely using satellite views, however on the ground things are somewhat different. Having done a walk around Gravesend today, quite a few road have missed, roads put in where there are none. The main problem is that shadows on the image causes errors to made.

Seems a shame that someone has taken a lot of time and effort to map out ways from
an image, only for then someone, me in this particular case, to rework lots of areas.

Another problem I have noticed is that the some of the imagery is quite old, some
I have seen is at least two years out of date.

So take care when using satellite views for mapping, try to use other sources as well if that is at all possible.

So its nearly 6 weeks since I started mapping. Time certainly flys while doing this surveying job! Have been covering North West Kent as that is where I'm normally based. Surprising at times what you find when you dive down a road/street that you have not visited before. Some you think, "I may come here sometime again and explore" and other places where you think " mmmm... lets get out of here before my wheels disappear"!

Most of my tracks are done by "driveby surveying" that is using my Navman N40i, which is OK for the raw logs, but as I found out don't trust it for anything else.

I normally whizz round unmapped roads while going onto or from work, to get the roads on the map then return later at leisure to pickup the detail.

So to date I think I've covered all the roads in Cliffe Woods in Kent, some bits of the surrounding areas. One area I've tried to sort out is the new layout at the M25 J2 /A2 junction, but have failed so far, go there by day it's full of traffic (a car park!) or at night its closed because its still being built!

Enough for now,......and before I forget thanks to TimSC for his encouragement email :-)