This week we’ve been revisiting our old friends; the GPS and QGIS.
Some of you might remember last year the aches and pains we went through to record GPS data on site just before the 3G network shut down for good, and then the trial of importing that data into the forever exasperating QGIS.
Unfortunatly we’re back at it agaion, but this time with a new GPS to play with.
We’re all learning as a team to use a new, up to date Emlid GPS, and although the basics are the same, the interface is worlds away from the traditional archaeological GPS.
Emlid can be used from your phone, creating a map of your recorded point elevations in real time.
In many ways this makes teaching and learning the principles of GPS easier, as you can see and change what you’re doing as you’re doing it. On the other hand, it comes with added challenges, such as racing against our phones pathetic battery life. With traditional GPS models, you use a small computer, almost like a Blackberry phone for the geriatric among us, to record your points in a set of codes. Unfortunately we didn’t spring for the code library, plumping with the free app, so we also need to make up our own codes, import the points in to QGIS and turn the points into polygons or lines manually.
This shouldn’t be a problem, after all there is a YouTube tutorial for everything, right?
Wrong!
Some of you may remember last year we had difficulty convincing QGIS that Jarrow wasn’t situated in beautiful Nigeria. We managed to fix that bug once, so can someone please explain to me why we are now floating off the coast of Cornwall!
