gps – Yak & Natter

111 miles walked in June

jane — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 10:17:00 +0000

As I mentioned earlier my running has pretty much stopped other than the occasional sudden burst when taking Skitters out for a walk. And you know what, that’s fine. My motivation for running was down to two things:

get regular exercise
spend time out doors

Both of these are fulfilled just by giving Skitters the exercise she needs.

When I was still running I bought a Garmin Forerunner 205 to replace the Nokia SportsTracker application I was running on my phone. I take this watch out with me on almost every walk I do with Skitters, and record the majority of the route (sometimes, especially here in the built up part of Brighton, it takes a while to lock on to the location). I’m using the excellent application Ascent to read the tracks from the phone and create them into a usable format, and export them to kml format for use on our maps page. I’ve found this combination to work brilliantly, and have found Ascent to be a great tool allowing me to record what we’ve been up to.

It also provides a summary page, allowing me to summarise the month of june as

We’ve got ourselves into a bit of a routine. Generally, I do the morning walk, Richard does the evening walk and we both do weekend walks. In reality though, we often both go out with her. June started with Richard being away at Java One in San Francisco, so I was the only dog-walker, which obviously bumps up my numbers this month somewhat. On top of the daily walks along Brighton/Hove seafront, June has included walks in Stanmer Park [1][2][3], Lancing for low tides [1][2][3], Ashdown Forest [1], Devil’s Dyke [1][2][3], Nymans woods [1], Firle [1] ending up at the excelent Ram Inn at Firle (a dog-friendly pub selling lovely food), Barcombe [1] (involving a beer at the Anchor Inn) and a weekend in Margate with Richard’s folks [1][2][3]

A couple of my favourite Skitters related photos from June are:

and

Mountain bike ride

jane — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:13:00 +0000

Every few weeks or so during summer one of the Madgex guys, Steve, organises mountain bike rides after work. They’ve always sounded a bit hard-core but this weeks was accessible for us lesser mortals (or maybe just me :-)). The hard core bunch left the office and headed over the downs via Devil’s Dyke (I think) and down to Shoreham. I got on the train and arrived at Shoreham station all refreshed and ready to pedal.

I switched on the GPS unit to start recording where we were and we headed off along the River Adur for 40 minutes or so until we got to the Bridge Inn at Upper Beeding. Here we stopped, refueled on beer, soft drinks and crisps for 20 minutes before heading back on the other side of the river and back to Shoreham. We waved goodbye to 2 of our party when they decided to head off back via Devil’s Dyke – nutters!

On getting back to Shoreham someone pointed out that actually it was only another 15 – 20 minutes to cycle back to Brighton, and would probably wind up being quicker than the train – so that is what we did.

Total (according to Sports tracker): 15.4 miles
Time (not counting the break at the pub when I paused the unit): 1 hour 48 minutes
Route: See the map

Nokia 6110 GPS Accuracy

richard — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 09:54:00 +0000

I took Jane’s phone on a short cycle ride this morning to see how the Nokia Sports Tracker works when combined with the 6110‘s built in GPS. You can dig around the route on Google Maps.

It’s looking like the accuracy is OK (good enough) when away from buildings; and pretty wonky when in town. It doesn’t have the accuracy of our Bluetooth GPS unit, but it does have the considerable advantage of being a nice all in one unit.

We’ll give it a go on a snowy mountain: it should be great for tracking a run down a mountain.