Netbook Travel Log

Hello there...fantastic site. Just found it last night! I've done some searching and I can't seem to find a definitive answer. (Maybe I just haven't found the answer I want.)

Here's the deal: I'm taking a long, 3-week road trip this summer. I live in the Eastern US and I'm going out west to Yosemite, Yellowstone, etc. It's gonna be a great trip! Anyway, I want to log the trip. Nothing fancy, just every so often a GPS latitude - longitude readout marker with a timestamp. I have both a netbook and a Garmin Nuvi 765T. I know that the Nuvi has a trip log, but my road trip is going to encompass great distances over short periods of time that may not be able to be saved completely between "data dumps" of the Nuvi.

I would prefer getting some sort of software like Streets and Trips 2010 with the GPS USB locator, but I can't tell if the software will support that or not. Seems like it would be simple to have a software program that records GPS data every so often, but maybe not. It'd be nice if I could do trip planning, etc. with the software I buy but I'm really trying to find a fairly reliable way of recording lat-long with frequent timestamps for the entire trip. (One major reason for this is to manually geocode photos after the trip).

Is this possible? Am I asking too much for software that does this? What would you Laptop GPS World experts advise me to do, all in all? Thanks so much.

Hi doctorcherokee,

to the forum. There are multiple solutions to your problem.

First, if you have Mapsource on your PC so you can transfer the track files from the Nuvi to the PC every night, you should be fine. When the track log on your Nuvi gets full it just starts shoving the oldest stuff out the back. If you are travelling so far in a single day that you start the track log overflowing, you probably didn't have time to stop anywhere interesting anyway.

Still with the Nuvi, it's pretty easy to create a waypoint (Favorite, whatever). That will capture the location but not the timestamp. Using the date/time for the name of the Favorite will solve that.

For photo geocoding, the track logs are the most useful because there are utilities that will match your photos to track logs and automatically geocode the photos. So using the waypoint option isn't the best solution. But it's a way to make absolutely certain that a specific location is captured and you have a faux "timestamp" to work with.

Streets&Trips with the GPS locator bundle will basically do the same thing for you. You can turn on the track logging and have it running whenever you are motoring around in interesting country. I don't know what the track log limits are for Strets&Trips.

You will find Streets&Trips really handy for trip planning but I doubt if you could use Streets&Trips track logs for automatic geocoding. It will allow you to export a track log to a GPX file but it doesn't export the timestamps, just the locations. Not so useful for your purposes.

Another option is to buy a GPS receiver known as a "data logger". This is a GPS locator like the one that comes with Streets&Trips, but it has the ability to capture a track log onboard that you can dump to the PC periodically. This is pretty much the same ability you have right now with your Nuvi. The advantage of the second GPS receiver is that you only need to run it when you are taking pictures (thus, smaller track logs), whereas you probably like to have the Nuvi on all the time for navigation purposes.

The final, and perhaps simplest, option is to just buy a new camera with a GPS built in so the pics get geocoded right in the camera when you take the shot. How simple is that?!!

Do you have Garmin's Mapsource and some Garmin maps on your PC?

How do you like the 765T? I'm eagerly waiting for mine to show up. I just ordered it on Friday so it should be here any day now.

...ken...

Ken...thanks for the response. The Nuvi 765T is great. I live in a smaller city so I don't really get use of the traffic. I didn't realize until after I ordered it that the Navteq traffic only covers certain bigger areas. Ah, well. My dumb mistake. But it works great so far. I wanted multi-point routing, bluetooth, lane assist, and free traffic. I previous had one without lane assist and traffic. This one will probably be my GPS for the foreseeable future...it has everything I think I want in a GPS.

See, I want a log with timestamps even if I don't see anything interesting. I guess I just want to be able to analyze the trip in detail for future trips, etc. Manipulate the data. Perhaps I'm being too anal about it?

Your advice is good. I've fooled with Mapsource a bit...I think the Nuvi (at least my old one) had a 10000 point trip log limit. And it had timestamps. If I dumped it every night I think that would probably work, but I hate to have to dump it EVERY night. Kind of a chore. I guess that's me being lazy. Would that data logger GPS have timestamps? I wonder what the trip log limit is?

If someone would come up with a piece of software that would, without any point limits, record to a text file, a lat-long from a netbook GPS in a certain interval and timestamp it with a computer's time then I would buy it!

GpsGate may be able to do exactly this, but I have personally never used this particular feature of GpsGate, so read the manual first, or just download the trial version to test it.

There are a variety of programs for the netbook you could look at for track logging and track log limits. Any of them would work with an inexpensive USB receiver like, for example, Globalsat's BU353 connected to the netbook.

- Google Earth with either GooPS or Earthbridge (Google Earth doesn't work very well with a GPS without some help).

- Earthbridge by itself.

- GPSGate.

- Compass (needs its companion program, Xport).

Caveat: I have not tested any of these as data loggers so I have no idea if or how that might work out. I just offer them as a starting point to check out that idea.

Perhaps some of the other members could chime in with other possibilities for doing data logging directly on the netbook.

...ken...

Haha, I will not personally hold you accountable for not testing all of them for me. A starting point is certainly what I needed!!

If I just had some way, like I mentioned, to use those to dump raw lat-long every so often (with a timestamp), and some way to load that into Mapsource or some other mainstream mapping program, I would be a happy camper.

I will give some of those a look and I really appreciate both of you taking time to give me the info. GPSGate may be the first one I look at. Like you mentioned, if anyone else has any success stories or knows of a way to conveniently have a netbook log lat-long data from a usb GPS instrument, let me know!!

In case I didn't mention it specifically, when I refer to "track logs" or "data loggers", I'm refering specifically to a file that contains a running list of data points along the path that you have travelled. Each data point includes the lat/long coordinates and a timestamp.

How frequently the data points are captured usually depends on a couple of things. Some nav programs and devices allow you to specify a "frequency" that might be as often as every few seconds. Or it might be as infrequently as a data point saved only when you make a non-trivial change in direction.

These data logs or track logs are intended for you to be able to load them into a program like Google Earth or Mapsource and see exactly where you travelled. It turns out that they are really handy for geocoding photographs because there will usually be a data point that's close enough to the time the picture was taken that it's probably also reasonably close, geographically, to where the picture was taken.

There are programs out there that can rip through a folder full of images, check the timestamp on an image against the timestamps in a track log, grab the coordinates from the matching timestamp in the track log and stick them in the image file as a geocode.

That's just for clarification for others reading this thread because you already knew all that, of course.

...ken...

My initial impressions are that the cheapest, easiest, and most effective way to go would be to 1) get that BU353 (which looks awesome, by the way, and the Amazon reviews confirm that), and 2) try the Compass/Xport program.

It looks like GPSGate would definitely work, but since apparently Compass/Xport are free I might try that and if that isn't to my liking then I'd try the GPSGate. GPSGate looks well done, though...worth the money if it can do what I want it to do.

If I can swing this, and I can set a frequency of logging, I wonder how often lat-long points should be logged? Assuming 24 hours of straight logging (which is unlikely), that's 1440 if it's one per minute. Every 2 minutes, 720. Every 3 minutes, 480. Maybe that's reasonable. Under 500 per day even if I go all day long. I want a detailed log but don't want TOO much data.

You can never have too much data!!!

Actually, if you want to eventually use the automated geocoding software, you will find that the bigger the potential gap between the timestamp on the picture and the nearest timestamp(s) in the track log, the more difficulty the software will have in deciding on a location to select for geocoding. If the gap is large enough, the automated software might simply reject all of the nearby timestamps as being too inaccurate to be useful.

...ken...

You know, you're right about data, Ken. The techno geek in me should have realized that. Especially since file size won't be an issue...just text. What software is good at automatically geocoding photos? Do you know of any free stuff that will do that?

I haven't looked in many months. Your search engine will likely find as many as mine will. Perhaps someone else has some suggestions. .... It seems to me there was a really excellent tutorial that someone posted in here awhile back. Perhaps start with the search box at the top of any forum page and searh for "geocode pictures".

...ken...

RsH described how he did it once: GPS data from a cruise used to geocode photos

Yes, that's the one I was thinking of, Marvin. Also at the bottom of the page in the list of related threads is a release you posted about a product that will work with Streets&Trips.

...ken...

Hmm...that's a good link and good advice. I appreciate it. I will report back as I try things and/or make progress. Thanks again for the great site and the suggestions.

Alright, here's the deal. I bought the BU-353 and hooked it up to my laptop. Downloaded the Prolific USB-to-Serial Driver (PL-2303), installed that, then downloaded and started XPort. I started recording the NMEA 0183 data by checking the checkbox that logs the data. Works great so far indoors...I bet the BU-353 will probably get a stronger signal outdoors (obviously). Once you "Find GPS" on the proper port all you have to do is check the box to start logging the data.

I tried a couple of programs to parse the data...

#1. GPS Data Parser is a simple program that culls through the data and pulls out lat-long, altitude, and timestamps based on seconds in the day according to GMT/Zulu/UTC (0-86400)

#2. GPS Babel offers a ton of different interconversion options between formats. It's open source and on Sourceforge.

What's interesting, though, is that I looked at one of the programs RsH used, GPicSync, and it seems to be able to Geocode directly from NMEA 0183 data. I haven't tried it, but it looks like it would work.

My tentative plan is to use XPort to capture that NMEA 0183 data, and it seems like since it is a pretty standard format I can probably manipulate the raw data in whatever way I need to, whether to manually or automatically geocode photos.

Now, it is very easy to stop logging on XPort...uncheck the checkbox. It looks like if it ran 24 hours straight it would be under 25 MB or so, so that's not all that bad. If you want to stop and start logging to create another file, you can uncheck the box and recheck it. Easy and simple. The files are automatically labeled with the local time, but the actual NMEA 0183 data is in GMT/Zulu/UTC time. I think GPSGate probably has the ability to create new files at certain intervals, but as I mentioned even if it ran 24 hours it would be under 25 MB.

I also have found a site with a listing of free GPS software that I will test...maybe even something better will come up!