GSM (ie cellular based) GPS trackers

[buggsubique]

Hi,

Seems like a sweet unit for the price, but I think based on the limited GSM coverage in the areas we typically go to the GSM tracking would only be a secondary feature. So, the question is can this unit be used as a GPS logger, i.e. can it record tracks with an entry every x seconds or y meters and can the track logs be read out by USB? Doesn't look like it from the description but thought I ask. If it did I wouldn't mind the extra cost for the GSM features thrown in.

Cheers

No, not as a logger, but it can be programmed to send automated texts of location for a mobile tracking purpose. Remember, this is really just a peace of mind toy - "oh yes, I see he's in Hanmer, so he's obviously through the Molesworth" then 4 hours later "I haven't got a text location ... must still be in the Rainbow..." a text would then be released once back in reception eg 6 hours later "oh he's in between Rainbow and St Arnaud, so something held him up, but he's through and must be getting gas" etc etc.

Not a GPS logger, not an EPIRB/PLB, Not a Spot, not a cell phone per se just a cheap in-between of most of them.

[agricon]

There is a company called PhoneBeagle (www.phonebeagle.com) who produce a piece of software that you download onto your smart phone. It is primarily designed to allow parents to keep an eye on their kids and what they are up to but I think it has some useful features for adventure riding. The software tracks the whereabouts of the phone but using either GPS signal & the phone built in maps or the signal from GSM triangulation calculations. The results can be viewed on a secure web page. http://www.phonebeagle.com/demo.htm
The cost of the service is $50.00 US a year which considering what you get is pretty good value for money.

[.chris]

There is a company called PhoneBeagle (www.phonebeagle.com) who produce a piece of software that you download onto your smart phone. It is primarily designed to allow parents to keep an eye on their kids and what they are up to but I think it has some useful features for adventure riding. The software tracks the whereabouts of the phone but using either GPS signal & the phone built in maps or the signal from GSM triangulation calculations. The results can be viewed on a secure web page. http://www.phonebeagle.com/demo.htm
The cost of the service is $50.00 US a year which considering what you get is pretty good value for money.

I have a similar sys, but more aligned around the phone sending to the net, rather than the net requesting from the phone. www.gpsed.com

Works pretty well, and keeps good tracklogs, only problem is on a average day ride of 400km+ it creates a 8mb tracklog file which is too large to upload via 3g, so if you want it live to the net you need to segment your day. But nice peace of mind for my solo adventures, at least people can work out roughly where I am/was last on a mobile network.

Has the ability to send SOS etc but only work when you are in cellphone range.

[boarder]

No, not as a logger, but it can be programmed to send automated texts of location for a mobile tracking purpose. Remember, this is really just a peace of mind toy - "oh yes, I see he's in Hanmer, so he's obviously through the Molesworth" then 4 hours later "I haven't got a text location ... must still be in the Rainbow..." a text would then be released once back in reception eg 6 hours later "oh he's in between Rainbow and St Arnaud, so something held him up, but he's through and must be getting gas" etc etc.

Not a GPS logger, not an EPIRB/PLB, Not a Spot, not a cell phone per se just a cheap in-between of most of them.

Thanks for the info. While interesting, this particular one is probably not for me then. I don't see the value for me personally but at this great price it may just be the set and forget solution for many.

Quote Originally Posted by agricon View Post
There is a company called PhoneBeagle (www.phonebeagle.com) who produce a piece of software that you download onto your smart phone. It is primarily designed to allow parents to keep an eye on their kids and what they are up to but I think it has some useful features for adventure riding. The software tracks the whereabouts of the phone but using either GPS signal & the phone built in maps or the signal from GSM triangulation calculations. The results can be viewed on a secure web page. http://www.phonebeagle.com/demo.htm
The cost of the service is $50.00 US a year which considering what you get is pretty good value for money.
I have a similar sys, but more aligned around the phone sending to the net, rather than the net requesting from the phone. www.gpsed.com

Works pretty well, and keeps good tracklogs, only problem is on a average day ride of 400km+ it creates a 8mb tracklog file which is too large to upload via 3g, so if you want it live to the net you need to segment your day. But nice peace of mind for my solo adventures, at least people can work out roughly where I am/was last on a mobile network.

Has the ability to send SOS etc but only work when you are in cellphone range.

Slightly off topic: On my trip to Iran I carried a Thuraya sat phone and that phone could TXT the current GPS position to an email address. I wrote a piece of software that would reverse geocode the GPS coordinates (i.e. match the Lat/Long to a name/geographical feature), find points of interest around these coordinates on wikipedia, compile a message out of these articles, and email that to a list of friends. That way I had a bunch of guardian angels keeping track of my whereabouts. The wikipedia info in the email kept them interested: -)

The danger with the cell phone is of course if you go in and out of range folks receiving these position updates get more worried than they should or they get so used to you dropping of the coverage map that they will simply not care after a while. So, for a safety feature I'd be very hesitant.

All that being said, with modern smart phones with GPS, that many may carry already, it shouldn't be much of a problem to implement just that. I know that software to report the position of iPhones/Android phones upon receiving a TXT exists. It is meant for lost/stolen phones. There is also software that reports the position to a website, for a fee, and you can follow it on a map (meant for paranoid parents).

It would also be fairly simple to write a software that sends position updates at predetermined intervals to either a private web server or just as TXT to another phone, w/o paying an annual subscription. When I get my hands on an Android phone I'll plan on doing just that.


Cheers

[.chris]

Thanks for the info. While interesting, this particular one is probably not for me then. I don't see the value for me personally but at this great price it may just be the set and forget solution for many.



Slightly off topic: On my trip to Iran I carried a Thuraya sat phone and that phone could TXT the current GPS position to an email address. I wrote a piece of software that would reverse geocode the GPS coordinates (i.e. match the Lat/Long to a name/geographical feature), find points of interest around these coordinates on wikipedia, compile a message out of these articles, and email that to a list of friends. That way I had a bunch of guardian angels keeping track of my whereabouts. The wikipedia info in the email kept them interested: -)

The danger with the cell phone is of course if you go in and out of range folks receiving these position updates get more worried than they should or they get so used to you dropping of the coverage map that they will simply not care after a while. So, for a safety feature I'd be very hesitant.

All that being said, with modern smart phones with GPS, that many may carry already, it shouldn't be much of a problem to implement just that. I know that software to report the position of iPhones/Android phones upon receiving a TXT exists. It is meant for lost/stolen phones. There is also software that reports the position to a website, for a fee, and you can follow it on a map (meant for paranoid parents).

It would also be fairly simple to write a software that sends position updates at predetermined intervals to either a private web server or just as TXT to another phone, w/o paying an annual subscription. When I get my hands on an Android phone I'll plan on doing just that.


Cheers

Was that software with the wikipedia stuff for windows mobile? sounds like something I would enjoy using.

I have a windows mobile phone (which can run adroid 2.2 if I want, buggy but functional) keen to keep an eye on the software you end up making, keep us updated eh!

[boarder]

Was that software with the wikipedia stuff for windows mobile? sounds like something I would enjoy using.

I have a windows mobile phone (which can run adroid 2.2 if I want, buggy but functional) keen to keep an eye on the software you end up making, keep us updated eh!

It didn't require any modification to the phone. The phone had a built in GPS receiver and one could TXT the GPS coordinates to either another phone or to any email address. The messages looked like this:

GPSWPT 090801081033 Lat N 050 Deg 003'038.652" Lon E 019 Deg 056'029.904" Alt 00662m 06:07:28Z 01.08.09

Most GSM providers offer TXT to email for free. Vodafone used to do that as well in NZ. You could just txt to 021010099 and put the email address in the first line and it would email the TXT to that address. Haven't used that in years and I am not sure if it still exists. There are free services like http://www.gpstrack.xtremeweb.de/w/faq/lang/en/ for that as well. Obviously not ideal for NZ, as you wouldn't want the extra cost (30c/TXT w/ Vodafone) of txting to Germany (it would work though), but something similar could exist here. If you do TXT coordinates in any of the supported formats to +4915156914243 you'll be able to view them on a map, for example http://www.gpstrack.xtremeweb.de/w/s...84620018cUcpT/

Back to the system I used: Once the email was received by my mail server, it would run the program automatically, which is just a Perl script, and send out the emails to the list. This was all done from a shared web hosting server, which I pay for anyway. So, no extra cost involved at all. The script basically takes the text above as input, looks up all the stuff, formats an email and sends it out (would be quite trivial to add it to a map hosted on the web server instead). The emails I generated and sent out looked something like this:

Steffen is on the road and he is currently at latitude N 33° 29' 7.08" (33.4853&°) and longitude E 48° 21' 37.78" (48.3605°) at an altitude of 1247m. This position was sent at 15:44:27Z 18.05.09 via satellite phone.



Google seems to think that these coordinates correspond to the following location:

A81, Khorramabad, Iran

(This is really just a guess and could be a location nearby or just plain wrong. The map below should make that clear.)









Click on the image above or follow the link below for an interactive map:
http://maps.google.com/?q=33.4853,48.3605&z=10





I found 5 Wikipedia articles relevant to this location:

2. Khorramabad
   
   '''Khorramabad''' (Luri: '''Khurramabad''', also '''Khorram Abad''', Persian:??? ???? ''Khorram Ab?d'') is the capital of Lorestan, a province in western Iran. It had an estimated population of 339,759 in 2005.[http://www.mongabay.com/igapo/2005_w...ons/Iran.html]. It is situated in the Zagros Mountains. Khorramabad Airport is 3 km south of the town proper (...)
3. Khorramabad Airport
   
   '''Khorramabad Airport''' is an airport in Khorramabad, Iran. (...)
4. Lorest?n Province
   
   '''Lorest?n''' (Persian and Luri ??????; also '''Luristan''') comprises a province and a historic territory of western Iran amidst the Zagros Mountains. The center of the Lorest?n Province is the city of Khorramabad. Borujerd is another major centre. The population of Lorest?n is calculated 1,739,644 people in 2006 [http://www.world-gazetteer.com/wg (...)
5. Alashtar
   
   '''Alashtar''' is a city in the Lorestan province, Iran. The population was estimated to number 28,949 residents in 2006 (...)
6. Borujerd
   
   pronunciation: ''vor?gerd'', also ''bor?gerd''; Borujerdi Dialect: ''v?riyerd'') (Name spelling variations: Boroujerd, Borudjerd, Boroojerd, Brujerd, Burujird, Borugerd) is a city in Lorestan Province of Iran. The city is the center of Shahrestan-e Borujerd (Borujerd County) and inhabits 270,000 people. Borujerd is one of the oldest cities in Iran reported at least from 9th century A.D (...)
   

Read more about Steffen's travels on OnTheRoad.Adventure-Antarctica.de.


The script I used is really simple (email addresses and API key changed):

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use LWP::Simple;
use Text::ParseWords;
use MIME::Lite::TT::HTML;
use XML::RSS::Parser::Lite;
use HTML::Entities;

my $RECIPIENTS = 'x@abc.com, y@xyz.com';

my $MAP_API_KEY="ABQIAAAAMGYl3moXkeTFTjLkupbHDhRjiBAr69Gq_mfbZIPqpq 31To6PjRT8AwPUdB5U5J-mM75Fdfdjkfjdkfjkd";
my %params;
my $thuraya_email;
while(<>){ $thuraya_email .= $_; }

my @chars = ( "A" .. "Z", "a" .. "z", 0 .. 9 );
$params{rand} = join("", @chars[ map { rand @chars } ( 1 .. 20 ) ]);

# Latitude
$thuraya_email =~ /Lat\s+(N|S)\s+(\d+)\s+Deg\s+(\d+)[^0-9]+([\d\.]+)/;
# print "DEBUG: $&\n";
$params{lat_dir} = $1;
$params{lat_deg} = sprintf("%i",$2);
$params{lat_min} = sprintf("%i",$3);
$params{lat_sec} = sprintf("%.2f",$4);
$params{lat_dec} = sprintf("%.4f",(('N' == $1 ) ? 1 : -1) * ($2 + $3 / 60.0 + $4 / 3600.0));

# Longitude
$thuraya_email =~ /Lon\s+(E|W)\s+(\d+)\s+Deg\s+(\d+)[^0-9]+([\d\.]+)/;
# print "DEBUG: $&\n";
$params{lon_dir} = $1;
$params{lon_deg} = sprintf("%i",$2);
$params{lon_min} = sprintf("%i",$3);
$params{lon_sec} = sprintf("%.2f",$4);
$params{lon_dec} = sprintf("%.4f", (('W' == $1) ? 1 : -1) * ($2 + $3 / 60.0 + $4 / 3600.0));

# Altitude, time, Comment
$thuraya_email =~ /Alt\s+(\d*)m\s+(.*\d)\s*(.*)/;
$params{alt} = sprintf("%i",$1);
$params{zulu_time} = $2;
$params{comment} = $3;

# Google Map link
$params{static_map_url} = "http://maps.google.com/staticmap?markers=$params{lat_dec},$params{lon_dec }&zoom=10&size=512x512&maptype=hybrid&key=$MAP_API_KEY";
$params{map_url} = "http://maps.google.com/?q=$params{lat_dec},$params{lon_dec}&z=10";

# Do a reverse Geocode lookup
my $url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?output=csv&ll=$params{lat_dec},$params{lon_dec}&key=$MAP_API_KEY";
my $response = get($url);
if(defined $response){
my @response = quotewords(',',0,$response);
if(200 == $response[0]){
$params{reverse_geocache} = encode_entities($response[2]);
# print "DEBUG: $response[2]\n" . $params{reverse_geocache} . "\n";
}
}


# Search for Wikipedia entries
$url = "http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipediaRSS?lat=$params{lat_dec}&lng=$params{lon_dec}&lang=en&charset=ISO8859-1";
$response = get($url);
if(defined $response){
my $rp = new XML::RSS::Parser::Lite;
$rp->parse($response);

$params{wiki_en_count} = $rp->count();
$params{wiki_en} = "

";
for (my $i = 0; $i < $rp->count(); $i++) {
my $it = $rp->get($i);
# print "DEBUG: " . $it->get('title') . ": " . $it->get('description') . "\n";
$params{wiki_en} .= "

1. get('url')
   . "\">" . encode_entities($it->get('title')) . "

   "
   . encode_entities($it->get('description')) . "
\n";
}
$params{wiki_en} .= "

";
}

$url = "http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipediaRSS?lat=$params{lat_dec}&lng=$params{lon_dec}&lang=de&charset=ISO8859-1";
$response = get($url);
if(defined $response){
my $rp = new XML::RSS::Parser::Lite;
$rp->parse($response);

$params{wiki_de_count} = $rp->count();
$params{wiki_de} = "

";
for (my $i = 0; $i < $rp->count(); $i++) {
my $it = $rp->get($i);
$params{wiki_de} .= "

1. get('url')
   . "\">" . encode_entities($it->get('title')) . "

   "
   . encode_entities($it->get('description')) . "
\n";
}
$params{wiki_de} .= "

";
}

my %options;
$options{INCLUDE_PATH} = '/home/iceflick/templates';

my $msg = MIME::Lite::TT::HTML->new(
From => 'no-reply@Adventure-Antarctica.de',
Bcc => $RECIPIENTS,
Subject => "Steffen's Position Update",
Charset => 'utf8',
Template => {
html => 'position_update.html.tt',
},
TmplOptions => \%options,
TmplParams => \%params,
);

$msg->send;



It will be a while before I get around writing anything for Android. I'll keep you posted though.

[Eddieb]

Here's a thread dredge but it seemed more suitable to carry this topic on than start a new one.

A guy in the states has built an Andriod app for GPS tracking with a number of other features, it's for sale in the Android market as 'Dual Sport Maps'.

Dualsportmaps.com
http://www.advrider.com/forums/showthread.php?t=691537

On of the more interesting features as I read it is the ability to find any of your friends that are running the same software. there's some sort of process to define your friends and obviously they need to be in a cellular reception area for it to work.

[buggsubique]

oAndroids rule. That looks like a cool and worthwhile app. Be great for things like the dk1k.

I have yet to use google's circles or whatever it is, but as a freebie, google lattitude and another app called family locator or family gps or something may be another option...

[NordieBoy]

Can download it on the ZTE but not even listed in the Marketplace on the Sony...

[.chris]

Can download it on the ZTE but not even listed in the Marketplace on the Sony...

Probably depends on the version of android (it requries 2.2 and above)

I see the guy on ADVRider says its free for inmates, but I can't find that version, seems to be $24nzd for me. Any hints?

[Eddieb]

Probably depends on the version of android (it requries 2.2 and above)

I see the guy on ADVRider says its free for inmates, but I can't find that version, seems to be $24nzd for me. Any hints?

I believe it's $20 to purchase off the marketplace, or free if you go to his site and download the source code, compile the code and install it on your device yourself.

[buggsubique]

There's this one here which I have been having a tutu with. It is a freebie and has internerd support. Looks like a network of friends can be compiled in the app and you can see each other's location. This can be shared so others can view online... You can also upload messages with your location update for all to see.

anyone else have an android and wanna try it out?

App is here (free).

My location link is here.

The guy is a private developer so no guarantee of ongoing commercial support.

[Eddieb]

I've installed it but it doesn't like my username and I can't be assed trying to come up with another one tonight.

[Eddieb]

Buggs

I played around with Latitude a bit, I could see your location updating regularly. I found my location didn't update even on my own device if I had Wifi turned off. It would only work if I had GPS and Wifi enabled, which is uesless if you are out of cellphone/wireless network range.

A device/operating system agnostic setup would be good, while I was doing my testing on an Android device thats actually my work phone so I can't rack up much data on it. My main phone is Windows 7 and of course there's lots of Apple fanboys out there.

[buggsubique]

Buggs

I played around with Latitude a bit, I could see your location updating regularly. I found my location didn't update even on my own device if I had Wifi turned off. It would only work if I had GPS and Wifi enabled, which is uesless if you are out of cellphone/wireless network range.

A device/operating system agnostic setup would be good, while I was doing my testing on an Android device thats actually my work phone so I can't rack up much data on it. My main phone is Windows 7 and of course there's lots of Apple fanboys out there.

Weird, shoulda been able to get simple AGPS location without GPS or wireless. Yep, obviously platform / OS has not resolved itself (and will it ever?) but I've found Droid is awesome for opensource titbits and good ideas.

As you say, something requiring Cell coverage is useless as an emergency device, but to track where say one or two riders are if they're running late to RV then it could be quite a good little extra once its all a little more mainstream. I'm sure with future cross platform support for good apps, and better data pricing it will be common as dog in the coming years.