[clug] Looking to buy a GPS [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

[Roppola, Antti - BRS]

Michael Still wrote:

Sam Couter wrote:

>> I want the GPS for motorcycle touring, mostly on poorly signposted 
>> gravel roads and fire trails. Without maps it's less useful than a 
>> paper map with no compass (I can at least tell direction from the
sun).

>Maps, or satellite imagery (which might be better than maps for dirt
tracks anyway)?

>My Nokia N800 can talk cell phoney stuff to the internets via a 
>bluetooth connection to my cell phone. There is an app called 
>MaemoMapper which will record tracks, and display the current location 
>/ track on the N800. It downloads the maps / satellite information from
the internet using the cell phone.

>It also supports pre-downloading the imagery if you are going to know 
>that you'll be offline during the trip, and know where you will be.

For work, I've been playing with wavelet compressed imagery, both
satellite imagery and scans of 1:25,000 topographic maps. Topo maps for
most of the interesting areas of NSW at 1:25k fits inside 8 Gb (or one
flash card). I'd most definitely use maps instead of imagery as that
indistinct linear blur could be a track, or it could be a power line
easement that is not navigable (with the maps, someone's taken the
trouble of finding that out for you).

Google seems to be using the PSMA road data (which is pretty good), so
you could use that if you are able to get an Internet connection, though
I'd prefer to have data local as the last thing you need is to lose
connectivity because you are far away from civilising features like
mobile phone towers.

Provided you are able to get some sort of device with a OSS GPS
navigation package, you could back-end to either/both map data sources
as services (localhost or interweb). QGIS can support real time GPS, and
a bunch of standard map formats, though it may be a bit lardy-barge
compared to stand alone GPS tools (the ones I found seemed to rely on
particular/peculiar map formats).

Cheers,

Antti

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