SE23 Forum

I had the idea of tracking myself with Strava on my smartphone when walking round Dacres Wood Nature reserve yesterday, and this is what it came up with



The fact that it looks as if I did some walking on water isn't necessarily wrong, because the location of the pond is only what I have edited on the the OpenStreetMap background map, working as well as I could from a Google satellite image, taken when the water was largely obscured by the tree canopy. What I was hoping was to use the track recorded as a way of improving the pond and other features on OpenStreetMap, but as it stands, this is not going to be much use.

I was expecting it to struggle, because even in winter, the trees are likely to interfere with the GPS signal, but afterwards it occurred to me that if I repeated the route a few times, there would be some averaging process which might converge on the truth. Googling,I find there is, which is fairly technical, but I'll give it a go.

Meanwhile, if anyone else is interested in using apps like Strava to help improve local maps, get in touch!

I use Google maps as they use both GPS as well as the mobile signal to improve accuracy.

It's surely a matter of what your smart phone uses, and I'd guess mine - a Samsung Android device - uses what it can, although I'd be interested to know what devices worked best.

Google Maps is an alternative to OpenStreetMap, but any information you contribute to it becomes Google's copyright, and looking at the Google version



I don't know that it's better - and is worse, in the sense of not including the paths round the reserve, which I have also contributed to OpenStreetMap.

View the screen using satellite view which you can download onto your device when out of reception range.

Mind you, the satellite view is just woods

Yes - but I'm interested in getting the tracks as recorded by Strava or whatever exported, and then being able to do something with them.

There will be a new local map unveiled by the station tomorrow at 2:30pm!

The new notice board is very nice, had a look before they covered it up.

For a second there I thought "When did they put a bridge there??"

although we do have funding from the Perry Vale Local Assembly for a replacement bridge / walkway, which should be installed sometime this year ...

The new map is very nice but quite hard to see without standing on the wall of the flower bed if you are either small or short sighted.