Went camping this weekend in the volcanos to the east of Damascus International airport. Followed a track from a colleague which I've now added to the map and I've also added some sand tracks off the road.
Great camping here, except being woken up in the morning by the rumble of tanks, fighter planes flying overhead and heavy artilery fire... a full blown military exercise was being conducted in the area, but none of the soldiers seemed to mind us being there.
The tracks are pretty good fun for driving on and the volcanos make for quite a dramatic landscape... is it possible to label these as POIs, such as natural=crater?
I'll definitely be back here, either for camping or for further exploring the tracks and the craters. I've not added it, but the road continues to the east before heading north and joining the Damascus to Palmyra highway... but I don't know if it's all black top or if there's some offroading involved?
There's still lots of railways labelled as roads on the map, which I'm relabelling and adding level crossings where they cross the roads. Please be careful when remote mapping!
I learned something this week... I've previously been using a Nokia phone for tracking but am now using a Garmin device. I realised that if I import the track to the Garmin software (I'm using RoadTrip) then I can export the track AND the POIs to upload into OSM! This is a real breakthrough for me since I didn't have the patience to add remote POIs manually, but now I make a waypoint mark with my Garmin and can then simply add it in OSM... great!
I've heard that some of my colleagues have gathered a lot of track data here in Syria which I'll try and get hold of and start loading into OSM.
I've mentioned it before, but the Yahoo! aerial maps are at least three years out of date and hence remote mapping from this data source is resulting in some significant errors... the biggest I can think of in Damascus is Airport Roundabout which is completely wrongly mapped at the moment... but it's difficult to map it correctly until I've driven all the roads on the junction... wish there were more people adding track data in Syria!
I've added several thousand kilometers of new data to OSM for Syria... do I get a prize? I wonder what the record is for number of kilometers of road added to the map? Maybe starting a competition would promote and encourage mappers to contribute more?
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