Took a bit of time yesterday to cycle and map in some more of the green lanes and bridleways between Marldon and Ipplepen. In theory nice cycling territory but most of the tracks are currently either too cut-up from horses or too rough to really enjoy so spent a lot of time pushing the bike.

Went out this morning with the CTC we didn't go too far as the weather wasn't that great. Only mapped in a couple of new roads from this ride but I also noticed that the A379 between Torquay and Shaldon had somehow got screwed up. It looks as if someone had mistakenly simplified it. Anyway fixed it now.

Took a walk yesterday to the west of Marldon and mapped in a load of footpaths and green lanes. Still quite a few more to do. Only problem really were the idiots on motorcross bikes who seem to think the lanes are their private race tracks.

Went out on a CTC ride today out to Buckfastleigh and beyond. Only added one small section of lane but plenty of re-alignment and joining of unconnected ways which I assume were traced from NPE. Dartmouth still needs some love although I find it very hard to get a reliable GPS signal in the town what with the vertical hills surrounding it.

Going to make an effort to make a few more diary entries as I've been a bit lacking upto now.

Took a nice walk last week from Dartmouth upto Totnes. Very muddy paths at this time of the year but still a really nice route to follow. Quite a few footpaths between Dartmouth and Dittisham still need to be mapped so plenty of scope for more exercise.

Also had a nice ride out with the local CTC group on Sunday. Didn't manage to cover much new ground but added in a couple of lanes around Hound Tor and also added the "Giants Chair" near Natsworthy. This may have to be dismantled soon unless planning permission is granted. I hope it gets granted as it sits very well in what is a very beautiful location.

With the better weather I managed to get out a couple of times this week and have now completed Paignton to a reasonable level. Could really use some decent aerial imagery though to trace in some awkward areas of woodland but apart from that it's not too bad.

I'm planning to move on to Brixham next which is currently ~25% mapped and time allowing hopefully get that done in the next couple of months.

It would be really nice to attract some more mappers in South Devon as there is still a huge amount to be done.

Took a nice walk yesterday down the coastal path linking Paignton Harbour, Goodrington and Broadsands beaches and managed to map in most of the various side paths and tracks down to the different bays and beaches along the way. This linked in very well with some recent work done by "I Like Cats" on the Broadsands to Brixham section of the path.

My main bug bear is that the coastline doesn't seem to be very accurate and with lots of cliffs and rocky inlets I'm not really going to be able to improve it very much.

Also managed to extend the steam railway line as far as Churston. Probably going to have to wait for the railway to re-open after their Winter break before the remainder of the line to Kingswear can be mapped in.

I've just started mapping the Torbay area in South Devon which previously was extremely sparse lacking even the main A roads.

I have an old Etrex Legend and have been using that on a bike mount to combine some exercise with collecting map data. I'm a Linux user and have been using gpsbabel together with a shell script from this site to pull the data from the Etrex which seems to be working great. So far I've mapped in most of the main roads and am then going to work out from where I live in Paignton.

Last week I bought a Holux M-1200 bluetooth GPS receiver which I hope to use with my Windows Mobile PDA (Acer N300). I've spent the last week loading various bits of PDA software trying to find the right one for me. The N300 has a VGA resolution screen which looks great but a lot of the software doesn't work properly with it.

Currently TrekBuddy looks good so I'll be trying that out over the next few weeks.

Any mapping help much appreciated.