User:Macalba

Gordon Smith

[All text below is quite out of date as at Nov 26, 2017! To be updated.]

I live on the Northern Tablelands (1020m asl), 20 km east of Armidale, NSW. Some of my interests in life are photography, bushwalking, four-wheel driving and touring, and, of late, mapping. Even my Amateur Radio hobby has a GPS connection (see APRS).

Most of my GPS track collection activites having taken place in New England, and on various trips to The Outback. OSM gives me a place to make good use of those tracks (as time permits, of course).

Tools

[All text below is quite out of date as at Nov 26, 2017! To be updated.]

I use a Garmin GPSmap 76CS for collecting tracks when bushwalking (external antenna on pack) and in the vehicle (external antenna above cabin). I also have an old, original model, Garmin eTrex which doesn't see much use these days.

The GPSmap 76CS was a fine device in its time but, compared to newer devices, lacks accuracy, repeatability, and memory, and limits the number of points per track to 10,000.

I use an Apple MacBookPro as my computing device of choice. This makes life a little challenging on the mapping scene given that there's not (yet) as much software available for that platform.

To give me access to MS Windows mapping software I run VMware Fusion and WinXP on the Mac. This gives the the ability, for example, to run Garmin's MapSource software on WinXP to load maps (eg OzTopo v1) onto the GPS.

My workflow, and the software used on the Mac, for OSM mapping is:

• I download the Active Track (track points having been saved at 1 second intervals)from the GPS with LoadMyTracks to produce a .GPX file.
• All editing and tagging is done with JOSM. (I open the .GPX file, convert to data layer, simplifiy the track (utils plugin) to remove extraneous track points).

[Previously I used to:

• (PC) I edit the .GPX data with OziExplorer (to generate multiple smaller files for the segments I want to add to OSM).
• (PC) I reduce the data with the "spline" function of (the free version of) TopoFusion to generate a new .GPX file with fewer track points contained therein (the quality of the track isn't impacted as it's mostly only redundant points that are removed).
• (Mac) I upload the reduced .GPX file to OSM via JOSM.
• (Mac) Tagging done with JOSM.

Life is simpler these days.]