During preparing my holidays for Albania (Shqipëria) I found a nice mini howto for creating contourlines. This is just a short writeup for mostly note2self and reinforcing the memory of it for the next time. :)

First I fetched the SRTM Data by a list I created from the files visible here: http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm/version2_1/SRTM3/Eurasia/ - the list looks like this:
N00E072.hgt.zip
N00E073.hgt.zip
Here Nxy and Exy show the lat/lon of the region which the contained SRTM data covers.

for i in $(less list); do wget http://dds.cr.usgs.gov/srtm/version2_1/SRTM3/Eurasia/"$i"; done

Then I converted them to OSM data using the acommodated commandline from the howto:

[phyghtmap][2] -j 3 --source=view1,srtm1,view3,srtm3 --start-node-id=1 --start-way-id=1 --max-nodes-per-tile=0 --max-nodes-per-way=250 --gzip=9 -s 10 -c 100,50 -a 19:39:21:41 -o SRTM-SQ

I just changed to -j 3 for some parallel processing and the -a 19:39:21:41 which defines the bbox -a LEFT:DOWN:RIGHT:UP.

Running mkgmap on the resulting OSM file gave an error - I found out one has to split that OSM file beforehand:

java -Xmx10000m -jar ~/bin/[splitter.jar][3] SRTM-SQ.osm.gz > splitter.log

Then I ran mkgmap on the split files:

java -jar ~/bin/[mkgmap.jar][4] --transparent --draw-priority=100 --gmapsupp 6324000*

Amongst others a gmapsupp.img is created - the file of my desire.

renaming it mv gmapsupp.img srtm_sq.img
and changing it’s name [gmt][5] -wm "srtm sq" srtm_sq.img
is just a minor tuning.
A short test shows the file works - yay!

Thanks to all the people creating that nice lot of OSS and some documentation!

PS: As (not only I) said: MarkDown sucks!
I used the quite handy editor from help.osm.org, but the code he creates is not fully understood by this blog platform.
Here are the links - not integrated but by footnotes..:
* [1]: http://osm.thkukuk.de/srtm.html
* [2]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Phyghtmap
* [3]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap/help/splitter
* [4]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mkgmap
* [5]: http://gmaptool.eu