I've not posted a diary entry for a while, but that's not to say that I've not been busy mapping!

I've added some roads plus the monastry at Maarmusa and the other week I drove to Palmyra, taking a new route back. I found a good stretch of unmapped highway from the Palmyra to Homs highway heading southwest towards Damascus that eventually leads onto the Damascus to Homs highway. I've also joined a few roads at some of the villages on the way as well as changing some more roads to railways (my pet gripe of remote mappers!).

At the weekend I walked around the old city in Damascus and have added a few more POIs to the map. I also drove up to Maaloula and added a couple of roads and the Maaloula hotel, as well as the turn off and motorway bridge on the Homs highway that leads to Maaloula.

On my Garmin I'm still having issues with routing from Damascus to Palmyra... the device goes into enless iterations of route calculations before eventually crashing and switching itself off. I've tried chopping the road up into shorter sections to see if this helps?

Yesterday was a public holiday in Syria, so we decided to pay a visit to the monastery at Mar Musa, about an hour drive from Damascus off the Homs highway. And of course, I always have an ulterior motive to do some mapping on such journeys.

Now that I'm using the OSM data for satnav on my Garmin, my attention is drawn to problem areas on the map. I've had ongoing problems with the Homs highway leading out of Damascus, previously on my trips to Palmyra, which I thought I'd fixed but my trip yesterday informed me otherwise. I've therefore completely remapped the highway and extended the mapping as two roads up to An Nabk, the junction that leads off to the road to Mar Musa... hopefully this will sort out the problem? It's strange, because the route back into Damascus is calculated no problem at all?

You can read all about Mar Musa on Wikipedia, but suffice to say it's a nice little retreat and worth the visit. On the way back, I managed to persuade the group I was with to take an alternative route, based on the advice of my Garmin. In hindsight, this was a bad decision and probably I won't ever be trusted again for directions, as the route led us along a very poor road and straight through the middle of a military zone. Fortunately, the check points were not manned so we weren't turned back, but just goes to show that you shouldn't trust the maps unless you know the roads! I preach again... don't get too carried away with remote mapping! If you remote map a road then at least label the road type as unknown and certainly not as "primary" just because it show up nicely on the satellite image!

I took the still unfinished extension of the southern bypass on the way back and mapped a bit more of it. Hopefully it will be completed in the next few months and it can be mapped properly.

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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.

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After a hectic few weeks I managed to catch up a little with my mapping, utilising the data I acquired during some recent trips into the field. I've added a few more streets to Palmyra (not named yet though... need to get hold of a tourist map to start naming them) and also added some streets in Deir Ezzor, tidied up some of the existing roads and added a few roundabouts.

There's still lots of work to do on the existing maps; many of the roads in Syria have central dividers and should therefore be mapped as two one way roads, but I figure given my time constraints it's better to get the roads on the map sooner rather than going for 100% accuracy. I am splitting them at roundabouts and junctions though.

During my travels I'm now using mkgmap to get the maps onto my Garmin. Generally it works well, but there are some major issues on some of the roads, for example the highway between Damascus and Deir Ezzor via Palmyra has some continuity issues with routing. I use Potlatch for my editing which is great for small areas, but it's not very good for making large changes due to the limited zoom out capabilities, so reluctantly I'll have to start using some dedicated software.

I'm having a couple of issues using my Garmin device. First of all, seems that Garmin are now blocking access to their website from Syria, so I can't use the WebUpdate software. Also, I can get my maps into RoadTrip (on my Mac) and have no problem making a route from Damascus to Beirut, but when I do the same thing on the Garmin device it can't calculate the route and gives an error. Think it has something to do with joining two maps.

I've also upgraded some of the cycle paths north of Damascus to tracks since they're accessible by 4x4... so they now show better on the map.

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I decided to take the back roads back from the airport today and discovered some new roads, plus the usual dead ends due to military barracks. I've joined together a few of the roads from other people's remote mapping (on the edges of the hi-res imagery) and I've changed what someone thought was a primary road into a railway.

I'm quite happy with this morning's work!

I went for my first spin with the new Colorado unit in the car this weekend. Unfortunately, since it was my first time with the unit coupled with an impatient wife due to a unhappy baby, it wasn't until I was driving home that I realised that the unit was not recording my track, so the new street I was driving around the Bloudan area were unfortunately not mapped.

I've spent quite a lot of time adding a good number of POIs to the Damascus map this weekend and will continue to do so as I have some good reference material built up from a number of years of expats living over here. I'm also driven by the fact that as yet mkgmap doesn't work with Garmin's address feature, so the best way of navigating (and in fact the way people here generally navigate anyway, since street names are a relatively new concept) is by making your way to the nearest landmark and working the rest out (or calling on your mobile) from there.

I've also been correcting the map and adding a fair number of new streets and street names (or English versions since a lot of streets only have their arabic names labelled). I wish the slippery map would allow you to filter the language! It would make my life so much easier making navigable Garmin maps, since at the moment I can only see on the Garmin unit whether the features have an English label added (since I filter for name:en with mkgmap).

I plan to soon roll out the map and the Garmin file to my colleagues at work... hopefully then some of the more technical minded ones will start contributing!

I bought a Garmin Oregon the other week and this evening I finally got around to making a routable map of Syria using the CloudMade osm map of Syria (since I've had nothing but trouble trying to download the data myself). I'll have to try it out on the road, but a couple of quick simulated routes appear to work great!

This has definitely re-lit my fire to continue with mapping... just wish I'd got a Nuvi instead now since I didn't expect it to work so well... looks like the POI's and everything come across from the OSM map! However, I really got it to use for mountain biking, although I still need to figure out getting the cycle may renders onto the Garmin.

One thing that is missing is the traffic lights and the speed cameras?

I finally purchased a new Garmin unit (Oregon 400t) and it arrived last week (took a long time to get here, but can't complain as I thought customs would confiscate it!). Last night I got the Syrian OSM data onto it, so I'm pretty chuffed!

I don't seem able to download the xapi data here in syria, but fortunately I discovered that CloudMade have the Syria map and that it's pretty up to date. So using mkgmap I converted the data into a gmapsupp.img file and transferred it to the device... and it works!

I'm also really happy that the name filter works great; so despite on the slippy map it showing the names in arabic, everyone's been using the name:en tag which i'm now displaying as the default tag on the garmin map... works great!

I find the POIs a bit small on the map, but that's probably a setting in the garmin unit? also, i need to play around a bit with what info is displayed at what zoom level... there are only a few motorways in syria, but lots of highways, but only the motorways show at low zoom levels making it tricky to find places. also, there's only a couple of cities in syria, but only these show at low zoom levels... need to be able to see the towns too.

The main thing I'd like to start working on now though is getting a routable map working... at least for Damascus and the main highways in Syria. I'll have to start doing some research. Also, I'd like to get the topo data onto the device for when I'm cycling... i.e. get the cycling map onto the device, so I'll have to start investigating how to do this.

My biggest problem though is finding the time, an issue compounded by the piss poor internet connections we have to endure here in Syria.

I drove up through Palmyra, Deir Ezzor and beyond last week, tracking as I went. Most of the roads I drove on are already mapped, but I managed to add a few streets in these towns.

The town in Palmyra should be pretty easy to map since it's pretty much a grid system, but Deir Ezzor is a bit trickier, plus there's absolutely nothing to do their so no real incentive for me to go back there... shame since with the river there it could be a really nice place; an oasis in the desert. Terribly dusty over there though...

I've also been doing some colouring in, starting to add some indication of land utilisation... can see that it's greener in Syria than you might expect then!

Went cycling near Halboun this weekend and have now touched up the Chalibon route (converting tracks to roads and giving some more track information). Takes a while for these updates to appear on the cycle map render though! I also added the village of Halboun.

Also drove down the autostrada in Damascus... they've gone mad installing cameras there! Along about a 5km stretch there must be about 20 cameras now! I'll try and figure out where they are and add them to the map, although they don't seem to render?

Might pop over to Cyprus in the autumn for some cycling, but just looked on the map and there doesn't seem to be any cycle paths marked... I'll have to see if I can track down some cycling (preferably MTB) routes, but if anyone knows of any then please let me know!

They're finally here... the traffic department has done away with the mobile speed traps and is starting to install fixed traffic light and speed cameras, probably more interested in making money than persauding people to slow down.

I heard that they'd been put in place this month but hadn't seen any up until yesterday when I noticed two of them on my drive home. I've marked them on the map already and used the relation:enforcement tag as described here:

osm.wiki/Proposed_features/Relation:enforcement

not too keen on it to be honest though... I have to set up a new relation for each different maxspeed and it's not clear what to do with a traffic light camera that also is a speed trap... so I've assigned both relations to a single (traffic_light) node... no idea how that will render though? i think it's a bit odd using relationships to mark the cameras personally...

I've started learn how to use the relation feature from the bike routes, which I've started to label... the render isn't updated for them yet though so I can't see how they're working... something to look forward too!

I wonder if it's possible to name cycling routes or give an indication on the cycle map render of the name of a route?

The cycle routes I've uploaded for Syria have well known names amongst the MTB community here and it would be nice to reflect these on the maps...

Yaffour is a weird place. It's the home of ambassadors, general managers, army generals the the generally rich and is place of high walls surrounding large, luxury villas and swimming pools. Yet the streets are terribly littered and it has the general feel of a building site, with spilled bags of cement pouring onto the narrow roads.

Anyway, I've mapped a couple more streets in the area. I've also added the Damascian Mall, the latest and greatest mall to be built in Damascus. Unfortunately, the aerial photography is too out of date to even be able to view it's older neighbour, the Cham City Center mall... shame we can't get some more up to date photography like that from Google!

I'm sure the Euphrates river used to appear on the map passing through Deir Ezzor in Syria, but for quite some time it's been missing on the map... wonder if anyone can fix this?

I'm still having access problems from home... it's fine at work and I can access OSM via an onion router at home, but not with my normal connection, which implies to me it's likely an issue with my ISP...???

Did some cycling near Zabadani this weekend (my introduction to MTB here and after a long absence of offroad cycling... bloody hell it was tough!) and have updated the cycling track we took to show what was graded track and what was more like cycle track. Also converted some of the previously track to tertiary road.

The government here is quickly making black top out of a lot of these mountain routes, which is kind of a shame, although it does make it more accessible i suppose.

I'll have to start looking at opentopomap, since these tracks are very deceiving without some indication of terrain... they're VERY steep. On the road down I clocked 80 km/h on my bike which gives an indication of how steep it is.

I've just added a few streets in Saboura near Damascus after I went for a walk there earlier today.

Strange thing though... I can't access OSM normally here in Syria today (I get a "server isn't responding" time out), but if I access via an onion router (so that it appears that I'm accessing from somewhere in Europe) then no problems.

Seems that traffic to/from Syria is being ignored or blocked somewhere? Normally the ISP here tells you if they're blocking a site, so is this happening on the OSM server? Hope it's not Americans playing around with export control, since that would avoid the point of opensource?

Surprised it's not already mapped... so I did the honours!

Take that back... it is there, but not at the coordinates as listed on internet references?

I recently was back in Palmyra and made a mental note to see if I could see the railway track that runs parallel to the highway on the satellite image and try and map it.

I've just had a look and I think someone has mapped this as a secondary road on the map? Just shows the dangers of remote mapping... needs to really be backed up with some real observations!

This morning I went looking for the mountain pass that runs from Serghaya, north of Damascus, across a couple of valleys to the road that runs north of Seidnaya. I've had mixed reports of whether this road actually exists, from both locals and expatriates, but when I look closely on Google Earth there's clearly a well defined track at least.

So, today I found the road and it looked very promising... until I reached a military check-point where I was informed I needed a visa to continue. How annoying. It seems though that the cycle track that I uploaded a couple of weeks back runs up this road for a good distance so I'll have to ask the guys who rode it whether it was blocked then... maybe it's only cars that they stop?

So instead I drove some tracks back down the valley towards Damascus. I've mapped one of them, but rather frustratingly my Nokia phone software (Sport Tracker) decided that it had had enough, so the extra tracks and routes I drove are lost... I'm really annoyed and think I will ditch using my phone for tracking and get a Garmin unit instead.

I've just added a service road and a track out in the desert along the Bagdad highway in Syria. One of the ways of navigating out in the desert is using landmarks and the mobile phone towers are great for this purpose... so it would be good to be able to tag these properly on the map.

Unfortunately I can't see a suitable key for referencing these towers... any ideas?

I've also tidied up the cycle tracks around Damascus and I'm about to add a couple of fire stations since I noticed there's a key for these.