SiC - David Sidwell

I’ve been playing with the free Shonkymaps for the new GPS. Basically it goes like this: the GPS only comes with very basic maps.  Just the ‘big picture’ stuff, no street names, mountain names, height information (topographic data) etc.

You can buy commercial maps and load them into your GPS. Actually you load sections of them in, for the area of interest.

…or some kind souls create ones for them - and us - to use.

On example being ShonkyMaps (the name is the users account name, not a reflection on the quality; “shonky” being Austrlaian slang for something a bit dodgy or not quite legal or legitimate.)   The best way to describe it is from the author themselves:

Shonkymaps are a set of unofficial Garmin compatible topographic maps that cover the whole of Australia.  The author was not satisfied with the Garmin base map that came with the Garmin gps, and at the time there were no other topographic products either official or unofficial.  He created his own set of downloadable topographic maps as a hobby / labour of love.

That quote - and the maps themselves - are from the Shonkymaps web site. I won’t go into detail on how to get the to work (it was VERY easy), but work they do.

Something went astray with my usage on the recent Mt Macedon walk, the map layer(?) seemed to vanish, but I’ll look into that. I could have pushed the wrong button or clicked on the wrong menu. The waypoints and log/track were still visible. Strange.

Anyway hats off to Shonky for a great job. The amount of detail is fantastic.

Took the still fairly new Garmin GPS out for a walk yesterday. I started work just after I got it, so have hardly had time to get to know all the cool features it has. So with an unusually warm day forecast for this time of year, it was back to tackle Mount Macedon again.

The main reason I got it was for logging, that is not for telling me HOW to get somewhere, but to actually RECORD where I’ve been.  Later on I can take these GPS logs and do a number of interesting things with them, including:

• Show them on a computer map
• View the log (and hence bush walk) on a 3D ‘map’ in Google Earth

Both of which - and photos of the walk - are shown at my Picasaweb album page.

The Mt Macedon walk is very enjoyable and a bit of a challenge. I guess I am somewhat fitter than when I tried it earlier this year, as I found the first bit - a zig zag climb of some 1.5km - much easier this time around.  The weather played its part too, it was a sunny, windy day, but the trees protected me from the worst of it. I really felt how strong the wind was at the summit area; on Camels Hump. It was actually getting dangerous being on the exposed rocks, with large drops all around, and the gusts pushing me towards the edge!