So I have hit the half way mark on my weight loss campaign so I bought myself a new toy.
My new gps logger
It weighs in at about 3 and a half ounces with the batteries in it and it has the same gps reciever as the high end Garmin units. Total cost is about 70 dollars with shipping. I went with this unit because I don't want to afford a full GPS unit because I think they are heavy and between my wife and I we seem to do ok with a map and compass. I did want some way to track my trips and to do some at home mapping for AlaTrails. I have to say I am completely satisfied. Albeit a little geeky this thing is great. You have several settings on it that allow you to change the rate as which it logs data. Out of of the box it logs every second and will ru for about 72 hours on 3 triple a batteries. I set it to the next lowest setting where it logs data every 5 seconds because let's face it I don't walk that fast.
I discovered that not all gps data is the same though. This little guy keeps a log file in it's internal memory of what is called nmea sentences. This by itself is useless but I discovered a great website
http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map?form=googleearthSimply feed the site your log file and it spits back out a kml file from which you can do this
http://maps.google.com/ma...0bc92c19&t=h&z=18tada
gpsvisualizer.co
m also allows you to output to USGS topo maps and a variety of other formats.
Anyhow, I thought it was pretty cool for the weight of a snickers bar.
Matthew
ohh and did I mention it allows you photography weenies out there to geotag your pictures?
