Color codes on recorded roads

[persunde]

When recorded roads finally turn up on the web, some of them are green and others are yellow. Does it have something to do with the quality of the GPS signal?
The yellow ones seem to have some sort of straightening applied to them by the server and the geometry is slightly different from the lines on my iPhone.

[persunde]

I understand that the archive contains my own routes, but why aren't all of them showing up in red as new roads?

None of my routes can match any existing roads, as there are hardly any recorded yet. I'm in Europe, so we're building from scratch.
My green routes turn up as red/new roads. They work just fine.
My yellow routes however, do not show up as new red roads unless I choose "make road from segment". But they all say they have some kind of filter applied to them, and they seem somewhat inaccurate.

I just got another data set in on the web and alot of them are yellow.
Poor GPS coverage might be a valid explanation. Or do several people have to record the same road before it shows up as a new road?

[persunde]

The way I see it - GPS coverage is poor by defenition in any area where you can't receive a good signal from the satelites, for whatever reason. But let's not get carried away with that discussion

Many of my yellow routes are labeled type:FILTER_STRAIGHT
These two are also redundant: UPDATE_TOO_SHORT and LAST_IN_TRACK

Would you blame those on the server bugs, or am I doing it wrong?

[persunde]

I know perfectly well how the GPS system works. I think it comes down to me not fully understanding the meaning of the english word "coverage".

Anyway. Is there any information available on the FILTER_STRAIGHT and other tags?

[persunde]

Okay, thanks.
I'll wait for an update from the waze team on those server bugs before editing my routes then.

[persunde]

That is true.

I'm not sure if bad reception is the problem though. Because my routes seem to draw up nicely on my iPhone screen, but some of them have different geometry (the yellow ones) when they appear on the web.

And I haven't noticed the GPS signal indicator showing anything but green in those areas.

[persunde]

So to sum it all up - those yellow routes are caused mainly by poor GPS reception, in your opinion?

Wouldn't it make a lot of sense to have a simple map legend to tell us this?

[Shorty-CM]

Actually, those colours aren't of the recorded roads. Those are of your GPS tracks and how well/poorly they match up with the roads on the map, or the quality of your communication with the server. Newly recorded roads are simply red on the map, and no other colour, and remain that way until you edit them. This makes them easy to spot on the editing map. The colours you're talking about only relate to your archived routes that you've driven. In fact, your archived routes still exist even if you didn't turn road recording on. So there may not even be any roads matching your routes. If you click on one of your coloured routes you'll see an error message indicating why they're red or yellow in certain segments.

[Shorty-CM]

Well, first off, poor GPS coverage isn't possible. Doesn't matter where you are on earth, literally, you still have a minimum of 6 satellites in your line of sight at any given moment. Poor GPS reception, on the other hand, is possible if there are trees, buildings, and other what-not blocking your view of the sky.

If you have road recording turned on your new roads will show up, unless there is something wrong on the server side of things. Which, at the moment, there is. They're in the middle of fixing up some bugs they've found. And from the sounds of it, we may actually get back some missing recordings from the past, too, if we're lucky. Anyway, when things are working properly it only takes one person to record a new road. They show up after the next 'nightly process' completes running.

[Shorty-CM]

Pick any place on earth. Stand there with a GPS receiver. The signal quality and number of satellites that you're receiving a signal from will constantly change. There are six different orbits in the system, and each of those orbits has four satellites in it, and they each complete an orbit in 12 hours. The number of satellites that you can see and their position relative to you is constantly changing. As is shown here, there is no such thing as poor GPS coverage.

Poor reception due to the environment around you is not the same thing as poor coverage. If you're driving down a street that has a lot of trees with a lot of foliage above you that create havoc with your reception, that is completely different than saying you have poor coverage.

Now, as for you "doing it wrong", well... The only thing you could do wrong is place your device in such a position in your vehicle that it directly hinders its reception. If you have your phone well forward on your dash/windshield so that it has a clear view of the sky, and nothing is above it but the windshield and the sky, then you are not doing it wrong. If you have it sitting on the console between the front seats, and the only thing above it is the roof of the vehicle, meaning that it's lucky if any GPS signals reach it at all, *then* you are doing it wrong. If anything goes wrong when it's got a clear and unobstructed view of the sky then it is either momentary GPS reception problems, momentary server connection problems (which has a remedy in the works), or some other server-side problem. As long as you give your phone a clear view of the sky, it's kind of hard for you to do anything wrong. Like I say, there's never less than six satellites in your line of sight no matter where you are on earth. And most of the time there's more than that. And you only need three to give you your location. As long as you give your phone a good viewing angle on as much sky as possible, which you do by getting it as far forward of your roofline as possible and under more windshield than anything else, it'll usually do a good job.