I found openstreetmap yesterday, someone referenced it in a news comment on heise.de. I planned to have a look at it, learn a little bit about it's technology (and user interface---that's part of my job). I never intented to participate. Ok, maybe a minor fix here or there, same as I do once every couple of months when I visit wikipedia.

Then I found a very big hole where my home village should be. Ok, that alone would mybe not have done it, but the data quality of the streets around it is just horrible. So I looked around for my old GPS...

It took a while, but finaly I found it. I put fresh batteries in, and after about 4 hours on the rooftop it had a fix (not a joke!). And do I need to add, that a "Magellan GPS 300" has no logging or PC connectivity at all? Ok, back to the boxes with old stuff, somewhere should be a Palm. Found it, a nice Tungsten T, but where's the Cradle? Another hour later I found it, too, and also the power supply.Now, let's have a look, some kind of sync software? Yeah, of cause it only runs on PowerPC and has not been updated for 4 yours. Luckily the Windows version runs in Parallels, although it takes about 8 sync runs until it completes.

In the meantime, 9:30 am had passed, so I could go to the nearest electronics store. Yeah, the have satnavs. Plenty of them. And also some 600€ handheld GPSs. But I want a Bluetooth GPS. Ok, let's shorten it_ after I circled the shop 2 times, I found them. Below knee height on the side of the display case. Great selection of three different modells: BT, BT+RDS and USB. I took the simple BT one, 89€ sounded fair (surprinsingly cheap, I had expected to pay twice as much). Now I own a nice "NAVILOCK BT-348"---what, btw, is more or less exacly what I knew about it before opening the ver neutral box.

At home I downloaded all 3 Palm GPS applications. Installed them, tested them, and decided to use Centus. Simple reason, it prevented any accidential switching of the Palm. Maybe the other two can do that, too, but as all 3 are free, I had no incentive to try to hard.

Then the shock. I was sitting at my desk, indoors, surrounded by PC equipment (one side a wall of 6 monitors (3x2), one side with printer, imac and 2 laptops, the other sides have cabinets with books, DVS, electronics...), when one of the programs I was testing told me it had a fix with 7 satellites. "No way," I thought, "there isn't even a line of sight to a window without going throug a monitor and 100cm of cabinets. That software must be faulty." It wasn't. That fix was real. Ok, the position jumped around heavily about 10 meters in any direction, but it was real.

Later I decided to go an a wald, taking my new toys with me. Palm with Cetus, the BT GPS and my good old digicam. It had started to rain a little bit, so I put on my (made-in-britain) cap. I looked in the mirror and took of the cap again. The cap has a shield, but unlike a baseball cap, the cloth of cap is attached to its front, so there is a tiny space between the shield and the cloth. Enough for the GPS! Best reception on top of my head, and totally invisible, yeah!

So I walked around the village for an hour, went into a supermarked for some supplies, got home and imported the logged data into josm. Next shock:

I walked main street to the end of town, circled the roundabout a walked back a couple of hundred meters. What do I see in josm? Two exactly parallel lines, exacly 8 meters apart, and the "rounded cross" from walking around the roundabout. Then the supermarket. Here the position jumps a couple of meters on every point, but I can clearly trace my way IN the supermarket. I can clearly see where I crossed (small) streets, and I can even see where the bus stop is, that made a 2 meter bend in the walkway.

Ok, so next thing for me is to put the streets bisides those lines. Next blog when I'm done with that...

PS: I did not spellcheck this, it's just some blog, not the map data itself!