OpenStreetMap
I improved my mapping equipment quite a bit by now.
First off I'm maping by bike now. And I don't meen the ones with the pedals.
I build myself a mount for my GPS device which I can see and use while driving.
The GPS tracks come off fine.
I mapped some small roads in Steinbach, put the whole village of Langenhain on the map (there wasn' even a place node) and added about a third of all residential roads in Waltershausen.
This all went fine. But I still lack a method of recording names and details. I have to either buy a action cam to mount on my helmet (which is nice for snowboarding too, but looks a bit funny out on the streets)
or use a voice recorder. The downpoint of the voice recorder would be that it is of no further use for me except osm mapping and is not quite inexpensive if you need a digital one with an external mic.
Has anyone experience in mapping by motorbike?
Additionally I set up a wiki page for mapping my district (osm.wiki/Landkreis_Gotha).
It's not quite ready yet, as I so far only copied the template and filled in the towns and villages. I still need to look into the existing details and set the status accordingly.
I also found osm mapper (www.itoworld.com), a nice tool to create rss feeds for special regions, tags or users.
I hope I can find help from local mappers to add more details to the maps.
Discussion
Comment from LivingWithDragons on 22 April 2009 at 23:13
It will be very interesting to see how you get on with the motorbike. Bicycle is often the prefered method: faster than walking, easier to turn than a car. I guess motorbike will be similar but less personal energy required.
Perhaps you could mount the cam on the bike somewhere (around the handle bars?) so you look less silly, but then you can't aim it. It must be very unsafe to hold a small camera in your hand like I do on my bicycle (I can just about hold the handlebars too).
Comment from daveemtb on 23 April 2009 at 08:09
I use audio mapping (driving), photo (cycling, using my phone camera, I stop for each one, your solution sounds great) and typed notes (walking, using my TyTN II smartphone GPS)
Out of the two you are considering, I prefer camera. The problem depends on your language, but in English, it is hard to figure out the spelling sometimes from the sound (and I don't always realise when recording, if I do I spell it out.) The other problem is occasionally my recordings are affected by background noise etc. and I end up with one road in the middle of a thoroughly mapped area with no name, which is annoying.
Comment from Chaos99 on 23 April 2009 at 08:40
I know most people map by bicycle. But that's no alternative for me. I don't live exactly where I map (the city I'm living in is pretty much completely mapped), so I would need a train or drive by car some 50km to where I want to map.
To map more than one village I would need an awefull lot of time traveling between them. With my motorbike I can just go out for about an hour or two and map 2 or 3 villages.
But off course I or someone else will have to go out again on foot or with a bicycle to map all those tracks not accessible to normal traffic.
Mounting a camera on the motorbike would be a lot easier than mounting it on the helmet. You could judge the road surface and type with that. But especially in tight streets inside villages you can't see road signs or even road side objects like phone boothes or postboxes.
Handling a camera with my hands is not an option. While I can push a button now and then I need to be able to put both hands on the handlebar when needed.
I could live with a still image camera instead of a video camera, which could be a lot smaller. But I didn't find anything cheap AND small until now. Also I'm not quite happy with the prospect of drilling holes in my helmet. I need to find a way to mount it without leaving permanent marks.
My best candidate for now is the ATC ActionCam from Oregon. Maybe an old one to reduce cost. As I read the smaller cameras used in model building are not fast enough to encode fast moving pictures like when looking around from a motorbike.
A voice recorder would be cheaper, but I'm too not sure if the background noises (even with in-helmet micro) wouldn't be too bad. I'm mapping in German(y), but German names are not any better in transating spoken to written word.
Comment from LivingWithDragons on 23 April 2009 at 11:22
Just have the attitude that a head cam is cool rather than it being silly. You should upload a photo when you start using it.
Some mappers (me included) go out wearing a high-vis "OpenStreetMap Surveyor" vest. I wear it with pride and think it's cool, my non-mapping friends disagree!
Comment from Chaos99 on 23 April 2009 at 11:39
You are absolutely right! I will do so.
I hope I find a cam on ebay for a reasonable price soon. Or even better someone who could borrow me that cam for testing.
I of course still have to figure out how to mount the cam. It has to withstand the wind at more than 100km/h.