Veloviewer. Who is using it, and what do you get from it?

[loudlashadjuster]

loudlashadjuster said:

Did the modest Luxembourg version of JOGLE at the weekend (just the 114 km instead of 1400!) and really intended to detour a few km up out of the Alzette valley to cover off most/all of these ten tiles in the yellow box which I'll need to do to get beyond 12x12.



Due to some dodgy route planning on my/Strava's part and a few unplanned detours and climbs further north, my legs were not relishing the extra ~250 metres of climbing it would have taken to tick them off though.

Did a little ride to fill these in...and realised too late that the route wouldn't tick them all off



I should probably take a little more care planning routes in future!

Veloviewer score 97.139
1577 tiles, average of 7.494 km per tile - Up 67, only 7 of those were on this ride though, the rest on the ride I did last weekend.
Max square 12x12
Max Cluster: 291

[ukbabz]

I hate it when that one happens! I've been trying to use the strava routes and veloviewer plugin to make sure it doesn't happen (although yellowjacks OS approach is admirable!)

I keep finding myself planning long loopy rides to capture tonnes of tiles at a time, and then realise I don't really have the time for a 200km ride

[loudlashadjuster]

ukbabz said:

I hate it when that one happens! I've been trying to use the strava routes and veloviewer plugin to make sure it doesn't happen (although yellowjacks OS approach is admirable!)

Oooh, didn't realise there was a VV plugin for Strava to help with the route planning. Thanks.

ukbabz said:

I keep finding myself planning long loopy rides to capture tonnes of tiles at a time, and then realise I don't really have the time for a 200km ride

Yes, it is quite easy to plan 'a short fill-in ride' then realise it would take a full day to complete!

Edited by loudlashadjuster on Monday 21st September 11:44

[dirtbiker]

Really enjoyable 50km ride in the sunshine yesterday which did some good things for my max cluster:



Total Tiles: 1,062 > 1,070
Max Cluster: 108 > 134

A muddy farm bridleway was decidedly sketchy on my 50mm deep carbon wheels with 25mm Conti GP5000TLs - unfortunately saving for a house move means I would be a very foolish man to buy myself a gravel bike!

Still on 7x7 max square so that's this week's focus :-p.

[dirtbiker]

A very lovely sunny explore at lunch this morning saw some good gains to the north of Aberdeen:



Total: 1,078 (+8)
Max square: 9x9 (up from 7x7)
Max Cluster: 146 (+12)

Not many short rides left to play with for me now!

[Solocle]

loudlashadjuster said:

ukbabz said:

I hate it when that one happens! I've been trying to use the strava routes and veloviewer plugin to make sure it doesn't happen (although yellowjacks OS approach is admirable!)

Oooh, didn't realise there was a VV plugin for Strava to help with the route planning. Thanks.

ukbabz said:

I keep finding myself planning long loopy rides to capture tonnes of tiles at a time, and then realise I don't really have the time for a 200km ride

Yes, it is quite easy to plan 'a short fill-in ride' then realise it would take a full day to complete!

Edited by loudlashadjuster on Monday 21st September 11:44

One thing I've discovered lately is that you can load Veloviewer's website on your phone, and get it to display your current location.

Handy if you don't have a route planned!

[ukbabz]

I've been using the app explorer helper for veloviewer to do the same check, it works offline too in case your tiling takes you into phone deadspots.

Tonight I went to plug 2 empty tiles, I did take the bike on the car to a start line to take out either a 10mile detour or a stretch of the A34 to start... however pushed hard and got a PB on almost every segment, increase in Vo2 max and increase in FTP on the garmin. Also plugged the gap! I'm starting to think whether its best to try and grow my max square or plug away at the cluster. It'd be nice to have a 25x25 max square and 1000+ cluster by the end of the year but that'd take a bit of planning and time!




2963 (+2 tiles from 2961), average of 6.432km per tile (+0.013 from 6.419 km)
Max square 21x21 (no change)
Max Cluster: 761 (+8 from 753)

VV score - 99.495 (+0.001 from 99.494)

[Solocle]

A little bump to a 982 max cluster. A "pure" lunchtime tiling without motor assistance, but it's pretty much the limit of my range (and driving to elsewhere in BCP would feel like traffic roulette).

[Some Gump]

Went out and bagged some tiles today, lovely ride.
Click update, and my square looks all strange.

Hold on?

What is this????


You used to be coloured in!


Looks like I only had that square from a straight line that should have curved round - frustrating that it changed now (because I would have done the 1/4 mile to grab it on that other ride if I'd known)..

Not the end of the world, no-one wants to win from a technical glitch. However, I now need to do 2-3 more rides instead of 1 or 2 to get to 22x22...

[yellowjack]

Some Gump said:

Went out and bagged some tiles today, lovely ride.
Click update, and my square looks all strange.

Hold on?

What is this????


You used to be coloured in!


Looks like I only had that square from a straight line that should have curved round - frustrating that it changed now (because I would have done the 1/4 mile to grab it on that other ride if I'd known)..

Not the end of the world, no-one wants to win from a technical glitch. However, I now need to do 2-3 more rides instead of 1 or 2 to get to 22x22...

That "glitch"? You can eradicate that issue from the Strava activity page. Click on the "View on VeloViewer" icon on the left hand side (internet version, not sure about phones). This will open up the activity within VeloViewer and use ALL the GPS data points to 'smooth out' the route overlaid onto the map. Gives a more accurate trace than opening VeloViewer then looking at your overall picture. Worked for me to nab a couple of tiles that I'd earned, but which I'd been denied at the upload stage because of the "straightening" of the GPS trace. I think it's something to do with VeloViewer trying to use data capacity more efficiently, so on the 'Your Activities' map on VV you'll still see the trace as straight lines between data sample points further apart than the original GPS data sampling points. I hope that makes sense.

[Some Gump]

Thanks YJ, but in this case it's the reverse. I "did" have the corner due to a straight line, but then it's obviously picked up more data points and realised that I actually went just round the corner (a route I've done 3 times, from the looks of it). It's actually correct to have a blank tile, I just could have done with that knowledge a couple of weeks ago, when I was on a specific tiling ride right next to it (tile is something like 32 mile round trip away from home).

[yellowjack]

Some Gump said:

Thanks YJ, but in this case it's the reverse. I "did" have the corner due to a straight line, but then it's obviously picked up more data points and realised that I actually went just round the corner (a route I've done 3 times, from the looks of it). It's actually correct to have a blank tile, I just could have done with that knowledge a couple of weeks ago, when I was on a specific tiling ride right next to it (tile is something like 32 mile round trip away from home).

Yes, it works both ways. Sometimes you want it to pick up every last data point so that everything is accurate. One I have was as far as I could get on a gravel road into a secure military range complex. I rode literally up to the gate, leaned my bike against the fence, and hoped it would be enough to breach the tile by a few pixels. On another tile which was entirely within a private estate, I was surprised that I'd been credited with the tile even though ride planning suggested it wouldn't be possible from the road past the front. I opened up the individual activity to check, and the tile got (correctly) removed. I went back on a MTB to get that one as there was a bridleway that just clipped a corner of that tile.

Personally, I prefer to get as far in to the centre of a tile as I can to legitimately claim it. But that's not always possible with private property, rivers, rugged coastlines and MOD firing ranges hereabouts. I also seem to spend far too much of my "road" rides taking excursions onto bridleways and byways because tiles with no "proper" roads in them come up with tedious monotony. And no-one really wants to leave one blank tile in the middle of an area of claimed tiles because it seems so inefficient to have to go back on a detour to claim just the odd tile here and there...

[ukbabz]

Ah thanks for that one YJ, I've found an extra couple of tiles but no impact on my cluster/max square. I did an 80km ride with a couple of mates on Sunday. I didn't pick the route so only added a couple of new tiles despite the distance. The route did take into account climb #25 (Coombe Gibbet) which I managed to improve my time by 1min 14 (new PB) and puts me 26th on the VV leaderboard.


2971 (+8 tiles from 2963), average of 6.456km per tile (+0.024 from 6.432 km)
Max square 21x21 (no change)
Max Cluster: 763 (+2 from 761)

VV score - 99.501 (+0.006 from 99.495)

Started looking at Eddington - mines 45miles at the moment, it's a tricky number to increase with time constraints. Although my next ride will take it to 46

Edited by ukbabz on Monday 28th September 14:05

[Gareth1974]

End of month round up - put a lot of effort into building my max cluster this month by targetting strategic missing squares...


597 tiles (was 520 at the start of September)
Max square 13x13 (was 10x10)
Max cluster 316 (was 214)

Edited by Gareth1974 on Wednesday 30th September 19:15

[yellowjack]

Gareth1974 said:

End of month round up - put a lot of effort into building my max cluster this month by targetting strategic missing squares...


597 tiles (was 520 at the start of September)
Max square 13x13 (was 10x10)
Max cluster 316 (was 214)

My month in VeloViewer numbers...

	01 September	30 September
VeloViewer Score	98.554	98.583
Explorer Score	3,148	3,386
Max Square	18x18	19x19
Max Cluster	841	1,066

...and my focus has been split two ways. Firstly on filling in as many "holes" in my Max Cluster as possible, and secondly trying to push my Max Cluster east to join it up with a large cluster centred on my previous home. Getting close, too...


This is how my map looked on 02 September 2020.


And this is how it looks on 30 September 2020

(apologies for the changes to base map and tile fill colours)

[ukbabz]

Not long until you've got a monster cluster going YellowJack! I was hoping to tick off a couple more tiles this weekend but the weatherman seems to have different ideas too.

[yellowjack]

ukbabz said:

Not long until you've got a monster cluster going YellowJack! I was hoping to tick off a couple more tiles this weekend but the weatherman seems to have different ideas too.

Arrrrrrgh!




Today's ride. Went off exactly as planned, with no silly gaps left in the tiling map. So far, so good...


So I'd managed to fill in that gap between Winchester and Alresford, and was confident of being able to declare "Mission Accomplished". But for some reason, the two clusters didn't seamlessly flow into one-another.


So I had a look into it, and discovered this annoying blank tile. Just one bloody tile! One of many "holes" in my "old" cluster, but this one would allow me to join the two big clusters if I'd turned it red already. And you can bet I would have done if I'd known about VeloViewer tiling back before I moved to Bournemouth!

Grrr!

Strava link here... https://www.strava.com/activities/4138569361

ETA:


This screengrab was captured four days after I signed up to VeloViewer Pro back in April this year. Lots of progress made already, in less than six months.

Edited by yellowjack on Thursday 1st October 22:32

[loudlashadjuster]

That's a lot of pedalling, YJ, well done!

[dirtbiker]

Impressive stuff! How annoying to be stopped by one tile though, especially as it seems to have lots of routes through it!

[yellowjack]

dirtbiker said:

Impressive stuff! How annoying to be stopped by one tile though, especially as it seems to have lots of routes through it!

Well, after that slight disappointment, and the guessing games that caused it, I went out to my local WH Smiths yesterday. Plan was to buy OS Landranger (1:50k) sheets 174 and 185. Sadly they didn't have sheet 174 in stock, but with a BOGOHP offer on, it seemed rude not to buy two, so I came home with sheets 183 (Yeovil and Frome) and 185 (Winchester and Basingstoke). So no gaps now in my map coverage from Glastonbury to Woking, one sheet "deep" north to south. I couldn't get the 'Active Map' weatherproof versions though, so today was spent covering sheet 185 with Fablon on one side and marking up the tiles with a bunch of old OHP pens.

That all seemed to take forever, but with today's weather there was no real opportunity to cycle, and my wife was on an 'On Call' shift at the hospital so we couldn't go anywhere nice anyway. So sheets 184, 185, and 186 are all marked with my target tiles, and I'm ready to rumble just as soon as the weather settles. Far better than printing screenshots of my VV Activities page onto A4 paper and guessing anything beyond the limit of the print. This should make it all a lot less frustrating and amateurish, and hopefully will mean that I can ensure no new silly single-tile gaps appear as I try to close up the larger gaps. "Colouring in" sheet 185 completely looks favourite to be my next focus. Doing that should massively expand my Max Cluster, and possibly my Max Square. Or at least it'll give me a good base to build an alternative Max Square from when I run out of expansion room with my current Max Square (can't get beyond a 29x29 square with that due to impossible tiles at Fawley and Porton Down). It'll take a while before I get that far, but nice to have a longer term goal to go with my short term focus.

Out of interest I had a quick count up of the tiles on my maps, and sheet 185 is roughly a 27x27 Square. I say roughly, because the tiles don't match the OS British National 1km Grid lines exactly, so partial tiles would extend it to 28x28 at a quick count.

More worryingly, last time out my Garmin ForeRunner 910XT decided to go doolally again. It dropped about 16 miles of data completely. One minute it was there, the next it was reading barely 2 miles and no sign of a data file in the memory. After restarting it recorded 36 miles OK, but for the upload I used my Edge 500 (which I run as a back-up). But that lost the last half mile or so as it's battery only lasted 6 hrs 20 mins. The watch also thinks it's at between 17,500 metres and 30,000 metres elevation again. And the LCD display has gone a bit "grey" instead of it's usual crisp black text. I could well be in the market for a new GPS at this rate...