Discussion: Mapping on WinCE devices

Accidentally found this page http://o-map.net/ with tool myO-map for drawing on winmo devices. Looks quite advanced.

Looks like ghettocad for win mobiles. Would be fun to try it out. I have heard some mappers has used windows PDAs for years so there must be other apps too for win devices.

Looks advanced. It really doesn't need to be this advanced to get the work done. My my current work-flow suits me well, fast raster drafting & drawing with 0cad later at home. Like this it is more easy to allocate time for this - minimal time use in forest, 0cad drawing can be done later when ever you happen to have have some minutes spare time for it. But I am not much of mapper and I don't do much mapping, so I guess it may change if you do it more or more seriously, then you should have time for it, not just one hour or twenty minutes every now and then.

I fully agree that tool on mobile device does not need to be too advanced. Its enough to have raster image drawing capability with GPS cursor on where you can paint whatever you wish and then interpret and draw properly in more serious tool like Ocad.

I dont have Symbian or Windows mobile device anymore. So I am looking for some Android app, but have hard time finding any.

There should some raster layers or alternatively some sort of priority for colors (~ you can't draw yellow on black for example). You draw lots of cliffs and stones, then contours and then bare rock and open/yellow and green and so on. You may easily end up drawing over your cliffs act with brown and so on. With this priority/layer approach one could draw more carelessly.

At the moment one needs to be quite careful and save lots of versions just in case (I have save button and it saves as new file using time-stamp as file name, so it easy). If I ever make any modifications this layer/priority issue will be the thing I'll work with.

BTW, those backup versions makes nice animation how mapping proceeded :) I'll post gif animation when I am done.

After leg injury I also started to shrpen my mapping skills. Right now I am going quite classic route - with pencils, pacing but with one difference. I put my GPS logger under cap and additionaly load GPS track in Ocad. I check how info from GPS maches to what I got on mylar, make adjustments and see if something weird is going on ;). While I dont have suitable drawing app on Android maybe I at least will make some use of TrekBuddy http://wiki.trekbuddy.net/index.php/Main_Page with map exported from Ocad to check how good work in progress look in GPS survey and to double check questionable features.

Without touch screen you can have same grid under your mylar and same grid on your gps devices with gps cursor. So you can check live location from the grid & gps cursor. About 40 m squares would do fine. Not quite the the same, but might save from some pace counting on featureless areas/ areas with bad base map or no base map at all.

I guess one might use forerunner 305 too. Something like 100m x 100m grid, one square km = 100 waypoints (maximum for 305). Same waypoits printed as base map. In forest just estimate you location using the grid (you'd get about 20 m accuracy), then just build up from that base point. And walk along path and see it as track/gps tail on forerunner's screen and use grid/waypoints to copy it to mylar.