[Openstreetmap] geodriving results

[SteveC]

So the past weekend a few of us piled in to a hire car to take some
tracks. Everything that could go wrong, did. Nothing happened Saturday
as the car broke down: the clutch gave out. This meant waiting for car
rescue and shipping it back, which took a very long time.

Various GPS problems related to flaky hardware got fixed and we made a
late start Sunday going round various bridges and the two sides of the
Thames. Looping round Hyde Park and then off to map some stuff south
west of Kings Cross.

Conclusions

* its more fun than I thought it'd be

* something like 80 quid including petrol but this needs to be done
again without a broken down car to get lots more data (which means more
petrol money), The car had a good Miles-Per-Gallon. Amortise the sunk
cost of the hire itself over a few days would be better.

* At night is much better - far fewer cars on the street

* cycling / moped / motorbike is better for main roads

* Active antennas on the roof are better than an eTrex hung out the
window, but even in pretty built up areas the eTrex does really well.
Data from one of the active antenna GPS units, recording at 1 Hz is here:

http://bat.vr.ucl.ac.uk/steve/zool.gpx.gz

You can compare this to Jo's eTrex data. You can see the curvature of
corners, and 'squares' in the previous GPX but not in the eTrex. When
moving slowly though there obviously is little difference. Jo: didnt
know if was ok to post your data, so didnt :-)

I have more tracks from the other antenna but need to wait till the
weekend to get them off the thing.

Things to be done:

* needs people to tap out the metadata who don't get carsick doing so
(eg not me)

* needs a serious weekend of 10-4pm driving both days, which I'll
arrange after exams.

have fun,

SteveC steve at fractalus.com http://www.fractalus.com/steve/