User:Andrewnl

Mapping where

Based in Canberra, Australia. Currently mapping mostly inner North suburbs.

Equipment

Main current GPS is a Polstar GPS mouse bought on eBay, with both USB and serial cables, and a car power / Jornada PDA / GPS combo cable. The GPS uses the Sony CXD2951GA-4 chipset. The NMEA output provides position at 1 second intervals, plus DOP and number of satellites. Performance is generally quite good, but cold start acquisition is a bit slow, and at some times the receiver appears to stop reporting for 7 or 8 seconds, every few minutes.

Also have an old Garmin yellow eTrex handheld. Memory is very small and its track recording uses built in point reduction, which makes it OK for recording highways but not very good for urban streets. Not sure what results would be like if it was connected to an in-car laptop or PDA. Hand-held design means at best you get on-dash sky view.

How to convert nmea to shapefile

If you have both GPSbabel and gpx2shp,

for nm in *.nme; do fl=`basename ${nm} ".nme"`; gpsbabel -i nmea -f ${nm} -o gpx -F ${fl}.gpx; done

for gp in *.gpx; do gpx2shp -t ${gp}; done

Resources for Australian OSM contributors

Good description of Australian Highway numbering systems: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highways_in_Australia