Grasshoppermind

Readers of this blog will understand my interest in all things “geo”. Until recently this has mainly been theoretical and an interesting personal journey of understanding. Well theory will get you through the winter months, but practice is required when the sun is shining.

So after bolting my GPS unit (Magellan 320) to my bike I started recording tracks for the Openstreetmap project. This led me to a greater understanding of tracklogs, the mad amount of proprietary data formats used by GPS manufacturers. The hoped for standardisation, GPX. The amazing conversion utilities, GPSBabel and GPSVisualizer. And as an added bonus the creation of KML files for use in Google Earth. So after all that I think that I now understand tracklogs.

OK but that still leaves navigation.

So there’s a sport called geocaching, which involves navigating from one clue (or geocache) to another. If you liked treasure hunts when you were a child, you’ll love this. After initial hiccups, like using the wrong map datum,
I’ve learned to use landmarks, bearings, routes, and goto’s. Plus I’ve learned a little basic encryption along the way. I think there’s still a lot to learn about navigation, but now I know enough to get by.