Advice on buying a GPS recorder

Hi,

I was looking at google earth and came across some options where people have uploaded their day's skiing. I believe this is done by recording the day on a GPS recorder and uploading this to a PC.

I just want this for fun as opposed to anything serious so I dont want to spend a lot of money on it.

Any advice on products and how to use them would be appreciated.

Thanks

If you have an iphone there is an app that does this called runkeeper pro
its aimed at the running market and I use it to track my runs and bike rides but it has a downhill skiing facility on it.
I will be trying it out in Austria at the end of feb.

If you have a Nokia N97 there is also a app that you can download for free on the Ovi store called Map My Tracks. its abit basic and iv not really used it much.

Just had a quick look on my N97. it does have the option to select skiing and also an option for it to update your twitter acount every so many minutes it you wanted it to. your friends back at home could see where you was skiing and how quick you where going and stuff. that would be quite cool i guess. (if you can get a signal when skiing that is :lol:

The sort of unit I was looking at was the Qstarz 1300
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Qstarz-BT-Q1300-Recorder-Bluetooth-Receiver/dp/B001EV2IY0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1264239465&sr=8-1

Any thoughts?

I have a small iGOTU (from Maplins). I think I paid around £30 but that was in a sale. it's about 1/2 the size of a matchbox. google this... @trip i-gotu . it charges up from USB and lasts about 3 days between charges if you turn it off when not in use and set the data rate up sensibly.
it maps straight to google maps on your PC..i've just updated the software and it seems to have a new section that is aimed at sport so i'm interested to see what it does. It has a button you press when you take a photo and then you can add pictures to your trip at the exact location you took them.

hope this is helpful :D

You can register on Ski Line, and key in your ski pass number, no toys, no cost.

live_Ade wrote:it maps straight to google maps on your PC..i've just updated the software and it seems to have a new section that is aimed at sport so i'm interested to see what it does. It has a button you press when you take a photo and then you can add pictures to your trip at the exact location you took them.

That's probably not needed, if you have a file that Google Earth can read I assume it's some type of mark-up language like KML or GPX. That can be read by a bit of software that can look at the capture times of your photo's and work out where you were. That software can then update the metadata of the photograph to have the location of the photograph.

huh? :-)



If you click that it takes you to a larger version of the same photo. That larger version has loads of other data in it, metadata in the trade which is data about data. So the metadata for this photo has the latitude and longitude it was taken at as well as the altitude. That's coded in from a track file produced by a Garmin Oregon 550t GPS.

An online read is available and if you follow this link it will display all the metadata for my photo :

http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsnowslider.net%2Fgallery%2Fimages%2F2010_nordic%2F2010_01_15_col_du_mollendruz%2F20100115-124804.jpg

What you need is to make sure your GPS and camera have their times synced and some software, on the the Mac I use HoudahGeo and on a PC there's some things around but I don't know the names. You can upload photo's to specialist services like panaramo which provide the links you see in Google Earth. You see some appalling locations there though which I suspect is due in part to how massively inaccurate these GPS loggers are. Also, Flickr can read this stuff so this is the same image :

http://www.flickr.com/photos/snowslider/4282199946/

and they read my data to work out where this was taken.

This is all good stuff, I take over 5000 images a year and having a good proportion of them tagged with locations is useful. As this becomes more common we'll see an ability to search Google Images by location as well which will be great.