Richard's Tech Reviews

GPS on a plane 4: Ottawa - Halifax

This is real GPS data, captured on my Qstarz BT-Q1000, downloaded on a Mac using BT747, exported as GPX, and converted to Google Earth format using GPSvisualizer.com

Red track is flight from Ottawa to Halifax.

Altitude is enabled, so here's what the takeoff from Ottawa airport looks like

Google Earth track: Download YOW-YHZ-20071222.kmz (5.8K)

Google Maps view of the track.

UPDATE 2007-12-30:

Halifax to Ottawa

Google Earth track: Download YHZ-YOW-20071228.kmz (5.7K)

Google Maps view of this track.

See the reviews list for previous "GPS on a plane" postings.

Reminder: DO NOT enable Bluetooth on any device without first checking with flight staff, and Bluetooth is not permitted at all during takeoff and landing (I had the Qstarz in LOG-only mode).

TSA: lithium metal is battery Forbidden!

Seriously, who puts an exclamation mark in an official government table?
Here's a screenshot of the new rules for the USA:

via Boing Boing

To add to the confusion, you can see in the note above it says "ensure that devices remain switched off".  I have to assume that means "... when not in use".  Otherwise there are going to be a lot of unhappy people with electronics on the plane in a couple days.

meta: year-end update

Thanks to everyone for reading.

As a reminder, the list of reviews is always up-to-date and may get you to a specific posting faster than trying to search.

Coming up in 2008 will be a review of network attached storage.

The GPS logger market continues to advance very rapidly, with new and improved models out all the time.  Hopefully in 2008 we will start to see better support for the Mac, with some good driverless models as well.

I will have a review of a driverless unit soon.

BT747 for Mac access to iBlue, iTrek and Qstarz GPS loggers

Summary

There is good news and bad news.  The good news is that I can add another GPS logger to the Mac compatible list: the MTK-chipset Qstarz BT-Q1000.  Using the BT747 software and USB driver software, you can download the logs from the Qstarz.

The bad news is that this capability doesn't extend to the GiSTEQ DPL700 PhotoTrackr Lite.  While it also has the MTK chipset, it uses a different USB-to-serial chipset.  I was unable to find a Mac OS X driver for this chipset.

Details

After reading my blog comments and the forums on gpspassion.com (particularly Discussing MTK receivers and Tips and Tweaks), I gradually clued in that it's possible to access a number of GPS loggers that use the MTK chipset using the Java software BT747.  This software runs on a Mac (and other Java platforms).  It does require an additional layer of a driver to be able to access the GPS USB port though.  I recommend starting at the wiki page:

http://bt747.wiki.sourceforge.net/

It is not yet something that's particularly easy for a non-technical user, I have to say.  I followed the instructions provided for the Mac EXACTLY.  I have a PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.10 and I was connecting to the Qstarz BT-Q1000.

1. Bluetooth

This requires no special driver. 

Using Bluetooth I was able to connect to the Q1000 (the pairing code, incidentally, is 0000 ) to get live position information (so called GPS-mouse mode), but I gather it requires a hardware hack to enable the ability to control the device (in order to download logs). 

2. USB port

I installed the USB-to-serial driver, it's a simple install followed by a reboot.

3. GPS track joy

Then I was into the software and it worked -- almost -- without a hitch.  I discovered that I had to set a file path in the File tab first, otherwise I got an error "Could not open /BT747/BT747log.bin (-1)".

Once I set the path (I'm using /Users/myusername/documents/ ), I was able to click on Get Log and... wonderful... logged GPS track data finally flowing into my Mac.

It creates a raw binary file, but using buttons on the Log screen you can convert it within the software to NMEA, GPX, and other formats (it will write a new, converted file "GPSDATA-date.format" to your destination directory).

That's all there is to it - from there you can use the data to geocode photos using your Mac software of choice.  I will be trying it out with HoudahGEO and writing that up in an upcoming posting.

SIDEBAR: The necessary driver for the DPL700 would be for

Atmel chipset, Vendor ID: 0x03eb / Product ID: 0x6126 

There is an implementation of this driver in Linux, that is used in the iTU4l ("Linux-Tools for the XAiOX iTrackU and Gisteq PhotoTrackr GPS-Logger") software, but I wasn't able to find a driver for Mac OS X.  If anyone knows of one (or can write one), please let me know / make it so.  END SIDEBAR

UPDATE 2007-12-21: I did try BT747 (version 1.23) on Windows with the DPL700.  It can connect to it and get a GPS location (blacked out in image below), and determine that it's running MTK 2.0 firmware, but it can't retrieve logs.

I have posted a message to the support forum.

UPDATE 2008-01-24: Further examination of the communications by Mario (BT747 developer) indicates that the DPL700 uses a custom binary format for its downloads, so "Get Log" won't be supported in BT747 any time soon.

meta: Mac Firefox issues

I'm experiencing a freeze when I load this entire blog (the main front page) in Mac Firefox, I apologise if this is affecting you.  I'm trying to troubleshoot it now.  It doesn't affect other browsers or platforms, Windows Firefox is fine.  It also doesn't show up on individual postings, only when loading the entire front page.  Please contact me ( ) if you're having this problem loading the blog.

UPDATE: It looks like it was the sheer amount of information on the page (with many images and bits of JavaScript) that was hitting a bug in the Mac Firefox page parser.  I have reduced the number of posts per page from 10 to 5 on both recent posts and archive pages.  This seems to have fixed the problem.