just came back from a two week trip to the Allgäu / Germany.
Due to a lot of non-paragliding-weatherconditions there was a lot of spare time for OSM.
Equipment used: a Garmin HCx with 2GB flash with only the OSM based Map on it and as a backup/second data source a simple Royaltec SIRF3-based tracker, both set to a constant sample interval of 5 seconds.
I stored POIs, tracktypes, streetnames and other information into the Garmin-device as waypoints, so I could easily draw OSM data from the GPS-points and the waypoints using JOSM.
I had a laptop with me (offline for two weeks / no wlan anywhere)
and a copy of the OSM data of the area. Uploading the edited OSM-data back
today went without problems.
Some notes about the good things:
* both devices worked fine, were able to easily store the whole GPS-tracks without need to sync them to an external data storage.
* the garmin is quite nice to track and to store information, it works in rain, dirt (pen and paper dont) and darkness, one set of 2Ah batteries will last for more than 12h and it is possible to operate it with one hand. The display got a lot of scratches but i dont mind about this.
Bad things:
* "Waypoint memory full" / 1000 Waypoint-Limitation *ARGH*, WTF, i dont understand this limitation, there are 2GB of memory, this should be enough space. Just to explain: i used a waypoint for every post_box, telephone, power/tower, gate ... this counts up to a maximum of more than 100 Waypoints/day. More than once i had to stop mapping becuse of this stupid limitation, I was forced to manually delete some waypoints (each by each) from a cycling tour some weeks ago (i had a backup of this data on my computer).
Ok, this was not really bad for me because i had my laptop at home, but without the laptop this is a bad limitation.
* Text-length of the waypoints is limited, why? This device has plenty of memory, @Garmin: please fix this.
* annoyances in the Waypoint-user-interface: e.g. i wanted to map a way/name "Wirtschaftsweg Gernschachen", thats a long name, and the default behaviour for the garmin-device is to put the date and time at the beginning of the line, e.g. "11-JUN-08 16:55:07Wirtschaftsweg Gernschachen", and this is too long. So I had to press "Delete" for each Character of "11-JUN-08 16:55:07" to get enough space, thats annoying, where is the "Delete to beginning of line" button?
Even more annoying, I start typing: "11-JUN-08 16:55:07Wirtschaftsw" (ok. Limit reached), so, walking back with the cursor just in front of "Wirtschaftsw" to delete the date, than deleting char-by-char the date, and reaching the last character, the "Del" button converts to "Clr" and kills my text. @Garmin: fix this! Please.
* one last thing, not really bad, only a little annoying: download of the garmin-waypoint-data with gpsbabel and opening the file with josm just shows the "name" of the waypoints, e.g. "Road 14" or "853". This information is useless. So i wrote a XSLT-stylesheet concatinating the name and comment-value
-
to a new "name"-leaf, showing me the Text i entered into the garmin in JOSM. Does anybody know about a preferences-switch in JOSM to obsolete my stylesheet?
And one question more: how do i download the barometric height-diagram data to my computer?,
cheers, Alexander