[tonyr]

I do a lot of mountain biking and have not been able to find the ideal program for my needs: reliable track logs, including elevation, using a Bluetooth GPS puck on a Pearl 8100. My original idea was to use a GPS Data Logger that would record a track on it's own, but also be usable as BT puck for things like Google Maps. Unfortunately, the Wintec Data Logger I tried was not compatible. GPSNow would not recommend any and my query to this forum came up empty.

So... I had to get a compatible puck and use my 8100 to record the tracks. The three programs I tried all have pluses and minuses that do not make them usable:

GPSTrack: this is a nice, clean reliable program, but when I first tried it, it would not run in the background and an incoming phone call would stop the track. Looks like this has been fixed, but it still does not record elevation for any of the track points. On the positive side, it has support for BT GPS and reliably connects with the puck.

MobileTracker: next I went ahead and bought this program, but have not been happy with it. It does record elevation, but only exports KML. Not a big deal since I can convert with GPSBabel, but the program writes out a couple of URLs for every single track point! This makes the track logs huge. Also, the program does not remember options from one instantiation to the next - for instance, recording a track point every second is overkill for me, but unless I remember to change option every single time it is started, it defaults to 1. The biggest downside is that it does not connect to the BT puck very reliably and does not have any options to set the device.

bbTracker: this new program got off to a promising start. The visual display of the track, elevation and speed profiles are wonderful to look at. However, I used the new version (0.3.0) for a couple of long rides the past few days and was extremely frustrated that there is a bug that prevented me from saving the tracks. Once this bug is fixed, then the only other annoyance is that it does not reliably connect with the GPS puck. A couple of times, I had to do a "pull-the-battery" reset in order to connect - nothing else worked. To be fair, when my Pearl gets in this state, some other GPS programs, such as Spot, have difficulty, too. However, Google Maps and bbMaps have no problem. My guess is that programs should reset something with the BT API and those that only use GPS API are having trouble.

So... I'm still waiting for the perfect solution. I don't know if it's possible for the developers of GPSTrack and bbTracker to collaborate and share code, but that would be a killer program!

[saua]

Hello, I'm the author of bbTracker, so obviously I'm biased MobileTracker (and the price it costs) was the reason I wrote bbTracker. I simply could not understand how such a simple program should cost that much. And I always wanted to do some J2ME programming ...

Originally Posted by tonyr

bbTracker: this new program got off to a promising start. The visual display of the track, elevation and speed profiles are wonderful to look at. However, I used the new version (0.3.0) for a couple of long rides the past few days and was extremely frustrated that there is a bug that prevented me from saving the tracks.

Yes, I'm painfully aware of this one (see this bug entry) and I'm planning on fixing it in the next few days.

Originally Posted by tonyr

Once this bug is fixed, then the only other annoyance is that it does not reliably connect with the GPS puck.

I've got a similar issue with the internal GPS (I don't have a puck, so I can't test that), that's filed as Issue 10 in my bug tracker. I don't know if that's the same issue and (more importantly) if the fix is the same, but I'm planning to release such a fix in the next days as well, so I'd appreciate if you tested that.

Originally Posted by tonyr

So... I'm still waiting for the perfect solution. I don't know if it's possible for the developers of GPSTrack and bbTracker to collaborate and share code, but that would be a killer program!

That is definitely possible, because both programs are released under the Gnu General Public License (yay, for Free Software!). If anyone wanted, he/she could take the code of both programs and put the pieces together, anyway that's wanted.

The reason I didn't use GPSTrack back when I searched for such a tool was, that it only supports external devices. I did a few half-hearted attempts at adding JSR-179 support (read: internal and external GPS devices), but modifying is harder and (more importantly) less fun than writing a new one

One might even be tempted to port the GPS access of GPSTrack over to bbTracker as an option to what bbTracker does right now (this is what I would/could do) or go the other way around (which wouldn't be nearly as much fun to me, but which might be easier).

regards and let's hope that someday a perfect solution will exist.

[powercx]

Try to look for 3dtracker on google. I tried that, maybe it will work for you.

I tried Nav4all to remind myself where I park. Where I work, the parking lot is huge. But you can use Nav4All for points and maybe logging. Not sure, since I only used the programs to try to do some live tracking.

I also tried Mologogo. Might be good to look at for what you'll be doing.

Good luck.

[saua]

I'm happy to report that in the new release (0.3.1) of bbTracker I've fixed the problem with saving longer and more tracks.

I've also changed the way it reacts to trouble with GPS, but I couldn't test that with an external puck, so that might or might not be better now.

[Mark Rejhon]

Does these software also log altitude information as well?

I'd like to test BlackBerry 8800 GPS up in the sky. (No, not on a commercial airline.)

[saua]

Yes, altitude is logged as well.