The weather was glorious today – warm, with a bit of a breeze (as ever, it seemed to be anabatic and therefore detrimental to my inbound speed). The heat was also a bit warm for a climb, so I took a detour out to Rocky Mountain Cycles in Llantrisant to grab a new Camelback. If you’re in the area and need a friendly bike shop, then there’s nowhere better – they even filled up the Camelback for me and topped it off with some powder to keep me going. Pretty good job really, as I was out of bananas and hadn’t eaten much before setting out.

Aside from avoiding decorating and other rather dull chores that need to be done around the home, the idea today was to test out the geotagging of the new Blackberry Bold (9000). I wasn’t convinced that it was doing anything when I was out in the States, but it seems I was wrong. It was almost certainly due to the overshadowing of all the tall buildings downtown that was preventing a good lock. Here in sunny Wales, where we’re lucky to see the sky, it’s no problem. I’ll re-edit this later with some of the images tagged for the trip.

Max speed today was down a little on what I might have expected for the route. I’d have thought that I’d have been able to hit 45mph without too much trouble, but it seems that wind resistance was going to spoil that for me on the way back down from peak ride height. The other problem area was 30 miles out on the return leg – I’d forgotten there were a couple of short but annoying climbs on the way back in – and paid the price for it. Oh well, that’s part of the fun.

Track for 26th July 2008

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The service provides a means of being able to pre-record a route that can be exported to a gpx route in the same way I’ve shown previously. Rather than use Google’s directions service to be able to describe a route, you can simply ‘draw’ it on the Gmap Pedometer service and then export that out for use on your Garmin as before.  Now that’s more like it – as provided the high-res imagery is available in satellite view, you should be able to record off-road routes without too much trouble.

A word of caution though.  The registration/positional accuracy of the Google data coupled with the accuracy of your GPS unit at any given time may well lead to some pretty large error in positioning.  Pretty large meaning, don’t plot any knife-edge routes and expect to be able to follow them blindfolded wihtout mishap.  You have been warned!

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Kike has asked how he can get Google Earth route data out to the unit so he can design some new rides. Now what I’m going to explain here is similar, but is using what’s available for Google MAPS rather than Earth, as it’s generally simpler.

Now remember, this post is aimed at Mac users primarily – but I imagine that it’s the same deal for Windows and Linux users too – it’s just that I don’t have time to check them all out for you. If you’re a curious Windows or Linux user, just go and play – you shouldn’t be able to do any harm

Free Software Required:

GMAPtoGPX – you need to follow the instructions on the site to drag a bookmarklet to your browser bookmark bar. This is used from Google Maps to convert your route data to GPX format

GPSBabel

You will need to install GPSBabel to your Mac as we will be using this to upload Route data directly to your Garmin EDGE unit.

Once these are installed, we’re ready to go make some interesting routes.

Plug in your Garmin to an available USB port and turn it on, then follow the action on the video.

One caveat with this approach is that every stage of the directions from Google is treated as a separate route. I’ll come back to editing the GPX into a single route in another post. I guess one other thing is that this is no good if you want to actually digitise a route from the map base – particularly if it’s for MTB use.

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“OpenStreetMap is a project aimed squarely at creating and providing free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them. The project was started because most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive or unexpected ways.”

If you’ve been following the recent posts on the new bike and the Garmin Edge, then you’ll be able to see what’s coming. I’m planning on donating all my routes to the wiki as a socially-responsible thing to do It’s also a good excuse to get out on the bike more…

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