[OSM-talk] 'wget'ing largish portion of planetOSM

[Mick]

I have been struggling to get a largish chunk of open street map
covering an area from the Isles of Scilly in the south west to Bristol
in the north east using commands like:
wget -t 0
http://xapi.openstreetmap.org/api/xapi?map[bbox=-6.41,49.85,-1.68,51.56]
-O souwest.osm

but all I can get is an error - 'connection reset by peer' or 'timeout'

I also tried:
wget -t 0
http://www.overpass-api.de/api/xapi?relation[bbox=-6,49.8,-1.0,51.6][natural=*]
-O souwest-relation-natural.osm

but this required dozens of individual transaction to get results
osmosis refused to read.

am I biting off more than the server can chew or using the wrong
procedure?

could some kind soul point me in the right direction

mick