chihiro

Caddychunk

Great post. I'm not a runner, but I have a pretty good interest in skiing. I'd like to keep track of my vertical feet per day. My GPS unit doesn't come until next week, but I've tried to read everthing on GPS software for a while.
I've always wondered, while you have your bluetooth gps hooked up to your Axim (I have a X50v), what kind of battery life are you experiencing? I'd like to hike a two to three hours up a hill and ski for a half hour. Would an Axim X50v last for four hours?
I can't run my Axim for more than three hours before I need to change the battery. Sure, I do a lot of Wi-Fi with it, but doesn't bluetooth use the same amount of energy (as wi-fi)? Just curious.

chihiro

I have a x30h, and it's as battery hungry when using wifi, but using bluetooth it lasts much longer.
I use an extended battery so I can't really tell.
If you don't need the displayed info during the activity itself, I'm sure the axim and the GPS in your pocket with the screen turned off will last a lot longer than 4 hours.

bigdave240

BT uses considerably less power than WiFi so it just might work for you but using GPS to track altitude doesn't work very well. It is not a good tool for that unless your GPS has an altimeter built into it as well as GPS.

pesto126

Good Luck with Vito products.. they look nice and all. but their support leaves MUCH to be desired.. just check out their forums! Neat idea though...

chihiro

Altitude seems correct with chtigps so far, i have put the geoid correction of my area, and I have enabled sbas (waas for you in usa and egnos for us in europe).
It said +430 meters , - 429 meters, since i did a round trip across the hills it seems accurate with only 1 meter of difference.
Or maybe sirfIII GPS made the difference ?

Anyway I'm new to GPS thingies and have it for less than a week so I may be wrong.

Concerning Vito softwares I've never tried their product . But according to the above opinion, I'll back up first
Well I won't try it today, my knee hurt and I rather get ready for new year's eve.

Happy new years !!!

chihiro

Ok i had time to try them a bit more lately, so today i put on my running gears, took my heartbeat monitor, the BT gps in my pocket and the pocket pc in the pdair hard case and ... OH My God !! it's freezing outside....
Well i'm all geared up , I feel like robocop with all those electronic stuff , so I'll have to bare the cold weather.

I launch bluetooth and start Active trace it pairs and see 8 sats , nice.
I running, and 5 mins later I check the pda , all is fine , i like the feature of the elevation speed since I live in hills. (not really usefull but somewhat cool to have)

I keep following my usual trail, check the pda 5 mins later : it has frozen, well the system did. (have to avoid misunderstanding, it's cold outside but i doubt it would freeze that way )
I stop (breath kid , enjoy that pause ...) soft reset , restart active trace ... and an error pops up when it starts related to the trace.
I didn't feel like investigate and explore the ppc to erase the faulty file.

I ended up launching chtiGPS and resume my training.
I may give another try at active trace, but in fact chtigps does what i need, I love the export to kml or gpx file.


And the display is large enough for me to check my speed and the distance while i run.

JakeRich

Altitude is the least accurate of the axes with GPS. There are good technical reasons for that. If you are interested, read GPS201 for some of them. As for using it for vertical travel, Caddychunk, even without the geoidal corrections you can still see the change in altitude reasonably well. However, you will be hard pressed to get as much time from the X50 as you may need. An alternative might be the Delorme BlueLogger that will hold a phenomenal number of fixes and has a good battery life. You don't need the X50 with you, just take the blue logger and let it record the fixes, then download them over BT to a laptop/PC and do whatever you want with them.

chihiro

I read the very informative GPS101 and GPS201, and well I don't really care for the altitude that much, as I stated above.
Let's say it's just a nice extra stat to get, as long as distance and max speed/min speed , average speed etc... are more or less reliable it's what really matters to me.

I thought WAAS enabled and with geodical correction the altitude would be more or less accurate. In fact when I stand still the altitude change constantly in a range of 6 meters max (-3 to +3 around an elevation).
I think that's pretty good ? Or maybe

Kamel

the problem is, the earth isn't round... or anything close to it. this is where 90% of the inaccuracies of GPS happen.

i definitely agree with the bluelogger though. sounds like the delorme blue logger gps would be perfect for your current purposes in keeping track of your track record (... or something like that).

as far as verticle distance traveled, i dunno, it would seem to me that an altimeter might be the way to go for that. maybe there's a special device for skiers that does this. unfortunately though, altimeters are likely to be even less accurate than gps if not corrected. altimeters rely on a mathematic constant of a change in temperature vrs a change in borometric pressure. if the borometric pressure were to stay constant it would work perfectly, but the borometric pressure is constantly changing, all day every day =\ (same with temperature).

i know i didn't offer much help here, but atleast now you may know that keeping track of your vericle travel is probably always going to be somewhat (or even a lot) inaccurate.

i would say, however, if you can get a program which will adjust your gps readings automatically, it might work very well. i would also suggest the blue logger to you...

before either of you go purchasing new gps's though, i think it's important that you know a couple of things. A) the blue logger simply will give you a list of coordinates, it's up to third party software to be able to use these points. you should try to find software that you _know_ will play nice with the blue logger before you go a purchasing. B) the delorme pocket pc software is notoriously horrible. i would not suggest you purchase it with your blue logger. if you can get away with it, just get the blue logger itself and nothing else (well, from what i've heard, you're most certainly encouraged to do research and make your own conclusion). and C) you must have a bluetooth adapter for your computer in order to download the points from the blue logger to the computer. this isn't so bad, cuz bluetooth usb devices are cheap these days, but definitely keep that in mind when purchasing.

daviddd

hi guys - I'm going to set up my cabled Dell GPS for offroad activities (cycling the Alps). The cables that came with the unit have a car cigar lighter plug incorporated and when the system is set up out of the car there's no power to the GPS receiver, clearly this is meant to come from the car 12V supply (stepped down to 5V internally).

How does the Bluetooth GPS receiver get it's supply? I will need to do some adaptation but I was concerned that the receiver took a lot or power, seems from reading between the lines of this post that not much power might be required. Can you throw any light on my predicament?

__________________
Dell Axim X51V with Dell Bluetooth keyboard
A01 firmware (too cowardly to update)
Solar Charging system for cycle-touring Oz
*BT GPS with Memory Map Australia maps* wooohooo!
Thinking about Pocketmail for blogging by e-mail as well as GPRS/3G