Sunday 11 May 2008

Gizmo



Alert readers will have noticed that I now ride like a snail in more ways than one. Apart from my progress being a little more stately than I would wish, I also leave a trail of digital slime behind me, using this little GPS gizmo from Garmin.

When I get home I can use data on my speed and distance either to beat myself up, or congratulate myself, depending on how I feel. I can also load the digital slime into Open Street Map, and use it to plug any gaps where I have ridden a route that nobody has mapped before.

As the picture shows, I've loaded up the OSM cycle map (here it shows National Cycle Route 61, next to the Jubilee River, near Eton). However, in practice, while I am out and about I still use paper maps to navigate around. Perhaps I will adjust in time.

My excuse is that this encourages me to ride further, and faster - but the truth is that I just enjoy playing with my new toy.

Today's route was 40 miles out to Windsor, pootling about in Windsor itself, then a loop round Eton, Datchett, Old Windsor, Fifield and White Waltham back to home. This picture was taken just before the half-way point.

The weather was hot, but the route was flat. As long as I kept moving it wasn't uncomfortable. I took plenty of water with me, but I also sank a lot more once I got home.

2 comments:

Fat Lad said...

I love gadgets. I've been using GPS for a few years now to keep track of my rides:

http://www.bigalsplace.co.uk/fatlad/logs.asp

just in the process of finding a way to automate the conversion on memory map to the GPS standard of gpx

That way everyone can use my routes not just those with Memory Map

Fat Lad

gom1 said...

I don't know how to do memory map files. My problem was getting from Garmin TCX to GPX.

To begin with I started using GPS visualizer = www.gpsvisualizer.com

Which worked fine, but was a bit of a faff.

Then I fiddled around for ages trying to figure out how to get GPS Babel to work. I am convinced it should, but can't work out how.

Finally (for now), I downloaded TCX converter, which works a treat, once I worked out which file I needed.