RussMcD

About me

I live in Hereford in the UK, approaching 65, but actually retired many moons ago. My winter months are generally spent in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

SatNav

Originally I used a Garmin Zumo 400 to record trackpoints. It worked well on a motorbike (where I do all my mapping) but one drawback is that it does try to "snap" the waypoint to the nearest road, and although you can't turn this off, you can change the background map to OSM or blank, to avoid copyright infringement. It also had a number of other disadvantages such as the seemingly random manner in which it archives tracks, and a tendency to shorten tracks by ignoring points, resulting in very square shaped curves at times. I have since bought a DG-200 Datalogger, (£30 from eBay) and this works extremely well. It gives a much higher resolution than the Garmin, and of course, acts completely independently of any loaded maps.

OSM Software

Used Potlatch for many years but gave up when V.3 refused to run on my PC, I gravitated to iD editor. After a frustrating learning curve, it does seem to surpass Potlatch in many ways (with the odd exception).

Mapping History

I started putting some UK rights of way in the OSM as I had old GPX files, then updated nodes where I had local knowledge. After doing an off-road tour in Thailand, I wanted to put my traces on OSM so I could use again, but then when I realised how much other stuff was missing in rural areas, I used the Bing imagery to update. So far its mainly roads, rivers & lakes I'm concentrating on. And Yes, Armchair mapper is probably a good description, although I do concentrate on cities where I have my GPS trace to validate the imagery first. Since those early days, I have covered thousands of km in South East Asia, logging every road and adding numerous waypoints that will be useful to travellers (especially motorcyclists). I also rode from the UK to Thailand, logging the entire route taken.

This user lives in Thailand.