Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Better Geologgers Coming Soon

I've been keeping a personal GeoDiary of places I've been, my workouts, drives I want to remember, hikes I've taken. To do this I've been using a Garmin Forerunner and a Sony CS1 (CS for CyberShot) Both do the same thing for me, though the Garmin allows me a greater degree of control and the Sony has way better battery life and batteries are changeable. I've also tried software for my iPhone which is kind of a really good looking disaster of an application, since a phone call or any touch of a button kills the application.


All of these devices though don't do what I really want to do which is turn on a logger and leave it on and then let me decide later what I want to keep or throw away. The active GPS is great but it's a power hog and the devices are not so convenient.


Recently there are two solutions I've seen that seem to be tending in the right direction.


The first is a BlackBerry logger which you can just turn on. It's Achilles heel though is still battery life, though I hear the newer BB's are really good at managing GPS power it won't do what I want which is continuous logging, at least for now.


The second is I think the more revolutionary idea, passive GPS by a company called Geotate. They have new way of looking at the problem. I should disclose that they gave me a prototype to use. No apologies here, this thing ROCKS. I can turn this device on and just leave it going, it charges on the USB port I use to download data and will run for a long long time. Did I mention how small this thing is? Like the size of a match box They tell me there goal is to run for month, now that's cool. Set it and forget it. This is the future of GPS recording

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