We made some experiments as part of the online coverage: we gave a few cheap mobile GPS devices with GPRS capabilities to some participants. The next figure is a snapshot of the path with two participants on the way:
My experiments:
- actually, it IS possible to share locations online with low costs; the gps device costs around 100 USD, and woophoo is now suitable to recieve data and to provide visualization,
- cheap devices seem to work well; however, there are some drawbacks:
- we have selected two devices, that can send location data only in every 10th second as the most frequent sample,
- there are some mysterious data losses on the tracks; we haven't tested the devices carefully enough to know, if there were GPS, GSM signal losses or other problems,
- the capacity of the batteries are not the best, the units we used seem to work for about 6-8 hours under low GSM signal; however, batteries are replacable, and we can also change them for better quality ones, they are standard,
- the functionality of such a device is limited; eg. our devices have some buttons, but they are useless; they can not be configured to be used for beginning and finishing a track (the rich function set of the Woophoo Java client makes me maybe a bit critical).
- It is however a great fun to track long-distance racers online using this setup.
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