Matt’s Wobbly Journey

Today’s gad­get du jour is the Roy­al­tek RGM-3800 GPS Receiver and Data­log­ger. I have long wanted to exper­i­ment with one of these and today one arrived in the post from the UK. It’s a small ticket item (€50), but after a short test here I am very, very impressed. A GPS data­log­ger is just like your fancy GPS car receiver that pro­jects your track on an LCD screen with the dif­fer­ence being, there’s no screen, and it simply records your pos­i­tion to flash memory at reg­u­lar inter­vals. You can then down­load the data­file to your com­puter and plot the data on a map using google maps or similar.

It arrived this morn­ing and I popped the bat­ter­ies into it. It’s not much of a test as I sit here in the office, but Matt had to go out to run some errands and I asked if he would take it with him. I installed the soft­ware (Win­dows only unfor­tu­nately — Par­al­lels to the res­cue). The install was smooth and the device was recog­nized imme­di­ately. I access it and changed to log­ging inter­val to 15 seconds. The device itself is about half the size of a cur­rent mobile phone. It is powered by two AA bat­ter­ies which sup­posed allow it to fill the memory a few times.

So Matt wandered off a hour ago and I he reports that the device did a cold start out in front of our office in 30 seconds and that the light remained solid for the bulk of his jour­ney. When he returned to the office he handed me the device and I said well, we’ll see where you have been. I con­nec­ted the sup­plied USB cable and star­ted the data log­ger tool. It repor­ted that the device was oper­at­ing (and had main­tained con­tact inside our office here — I guess our win­dow is large enough). All I had to do was click to send the data file (tagged with date and time) to an NMEA folder on my drive. It imme­di­ately showed up in a Google map win­dow as part of the applic­a­tion. Plug and play indeed — col­our me impressed.

We looked at the path plot­ted on the map and he con­firmed that it was sur­pris­ingly accur­ate. It appears that the first few read­ings as it was get­ting a first fix were a little off, but it quickly got a decent accur­acy. It actu­ally seems to have tracked him cross­ing Pem­broke to visit the ATM at the Ulster Bank and when he went inside and to the counter at the phar­macy around the corner. He spent about 45 minutes in the Grafton Barber and it seems to have been tak­ing read­ings the whole time and get­ting some vari­ance. By and large how­ever and lack­ing an aug­ment­a­tion, the wee thing is quite accept­able accur­ate. I am look­ing for­ward to some fur­ther test­ing. One of the uses I was hop­ing to put this to was as a dongle on a knap­sack when I go bik­ing as a means of track­ing routes and determ­in­ing dis­tance and velo­city. You can set device para­met­ers to track alti­tude and velo­city in addi­tion to long and lat should you want to. The sup­plied soft­ware also comes with a photo tag­ger that will coordin­ate the addi­tion of geo-reference inform­a­tion to a series of jpgs from you cam­era after a day of shoot­ing. So far, very impressive.