Thursday 28 September 2006 by Edward.

You need to locate your destination. A GPS system would really help but you don’t want to buy one. First, it’s expensive. Second, you only need it for a few days.

Boston’s Nav-A-Trip now rents units for US$9.95 per day ($US14.95 per day for travellers to Europe), reports the DailyNewsTranscript. Nav-A-Trip will send units to customers’ homes or hotels. Once done, customers can mail the units back in prepaid boxes.
The GPS units are portable and can be carried while walking around a strange new city — giving directions and pin-pointing features of interest.

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Tuesday 12 September 2006 by Edward.

You’re in charge of a hike in the woods, a coastal whale watch tour, or a biking expedition and you want to retrace your path taken. Perhaps you’d like to send the route travelled to members of your party, via the internet. New thumb-drive sized GPS tracking devices are entering the market that you can take on your travels to record your every movement.

SkyTRX is one such GPS tracker. This unit records every second once it receives its two AAA batteries — recording for 28-42 hours depending on the battery type used, and able to store 100 hours of data. It is compatible with Google Earth and Google Maps. Cost is about US$300.00

I had earlier posted notes about the GPS thumb-drive loggers GPS-CS1, by Sony, and the Trackstick.

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Tuesday 22 August 2006 by Edward.

Whether you walk, hike, run, ski, scavenger hunt, or golf on your vacation, you may find that your hotel will hook you up with a GPS. Hampton Roads’ Daily Press reports that Hyatt, Four Seasons and Marriott hotels, among other hotels, give their guests tools to navigate and have fun.

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Monday 14 August 2006 by Edward.

The new Geocollector system from ESRI integrates their mobile Arcpad GIS (Geographic Information System) on an ultrarugged handheld computer with GPS technology from Trimble. The system is designed for field data collection.

Tourist destination operators can use the Geocollector for field mapping, asset inventory and maintenance, inspections and incident reporting.

I can see further development of ESRI’s Geocollector to provide location-based, multimedia, tourist experiences as with the NodeExplorer.

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Friday 4 August 2006 by Edward.

Sony just launched their GPS-stick — the GPS-CS1. How does it stack up against the earlier-launched TrackStick?

The Sony GPS-stick records time, latitude and longitude. You clip it to yourself then log data to the stick as you travel. When you’re ready, you import the logged data to your computer via a USB cable. Using the supplied image tracker and picture motion browser software, photos taken during the trip can be synchronized with the GPS data and photo locations identified. These photo locations can be imported to Google Maps. The unit cost is US$150.00

Though I don’t have all spec sheets in, here is a comparison between the two GPS-sticks.

DATA
Sony-GPS: lat, lon, time. TrackStick: lat, lon, time, date, speed, heading, altitude.
CHANNELS
Sony-GPS: 12 TrackStick: 12, 24 satellites
OUTPUT
Sony-GPS: NA. Trackstick: RTF, CSV, HTML, KML
COMPATIBILITY
Sony-GPS: Google Maps. Trackstick: Google Maps/Earth, Mapquest, Virtual Earth
COST
Sony-GPS: US$150.00. TrackStick: US$220.00+

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Wednesday 2 August 2006 by Edward.

Pull out your smartphone and take a picture of that secret wilderness waterfall you just discovered and automatically record its location.

ViewRanger from Augmentra (a location-based mapping company from Cambridge UK) is an “immersive” mapping tool for GPS-enabled, mass market smartphones. It is designed for the countryside and displays a 3D panoramic view of your surroundings. This is a great tool for the “occasional” tourist and outdoor traveller.

Maps are available for Great Britain and their national parks.

Richard Bloor of SymbianOne recently interviewed Augmentra’s founders, Craig Wareham and Mike Brocklehurst. ViewRanger, he reports, is available on the Symbian Operating System and the S60 mobile phone platform, used on phones such as Nokia 6630, 6680, and N90. They are in discussion with overseas partners to export their technology. The founders’ goal is “to ensure Viewranger is the off-road satellite navigation system of choice of consumers and outdoor professionals.”

In my correspondence with founder Craig Wareham, he indicates that Canada and North America are attractive (markets) for several reasons — the large ‘non-urban’ spaces in those countries, the potential number of consumers, and simplicity in (business) dealings. A current European mapping project, he adds, is expected to consolidate ViewRanger support for mapping, points of interest, etc. worldwide.

Roger A. Brooks Rule 6 “The Rule of Wayfinding” suggests that ‘Real men don’t ask for directions.’ Sometimes a landmark will have no sign. It may have meaning only to you. Mark your map. Post your smartphone GPS point and photo. Create signage.

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Friday 21 July 2006 by Edward.

HughesNet provides RV-ers (Recreational Vehicle) an automatic pointing mount and dish, and communication service called Datastorm. Datastorm is a mobile high speed satellite internet service. Datastorm users have set up their own users group to share travel experiences, help members with problems or questions, and also post locations to an interactive map.

The map, displayed with Microsoft’s MapPoint, shows users their GPS position, displaying the Dish ID, User Name, brief messages, and time of the the last update. Users can link to email addresses.

Roger A. Brooks‘ Rule 6 “The Rule of Wayfinding” reads ‘Real men don’t ask directions.’ They probably use MapPoint and Datastorm.