Howdy
Yes off topic :-) But here is an answer anyway.
Unfortunately, for Australia and NZ at least, only Satellite is an option.
Phones do not work out of major town centres.
That said I can't speak for other countries, but be warned that there are many
pit falls to using phones in the sky - primary problem is to do with shared
bandwidth. Channels are reused across towers that would not normally overlap on
the ground - but in the sky you overlap - causing big problems for the
telephone providers.
There are lots of phone based trackers for using in cars etc now, so if you go
that direction anyway you should have lots of choices. Once you get to
satellite however the choices are small, anything other than spot becomes
expensive.
Scott
On 21/01/2011, at 4:28 PM, Luke O'Donnell wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Apologies if this is too off topic for the group but here it goes.
>
> I've been filling in some time at the Australian club/sports class nationals
> (crewing) by looking into and testing some live tracking options. I'll
> outline what i've tried and found, perhaps some will find it interesting.
>
> I know there are some commercial tracking products, such as the fairly
> popular SPOT tracker (in australia anyway), however i was curious to see what
> can be done with the newer mobile phones. Most newer smartphone type handsets
> have quite a few sensors. GPS, Compass, Accelerometers etc, as well as access
> to the internet via 3g. I have available a HTC Desire (Android 2.2) and an
> Iphone 4, so they were the phones i played around with.
>
> The two main bits of software i had success with were:
>
> Option 1:
> -------------
>
> Instamapper (www.instamapper.com)
> Cost: Free
> Supported Platforms: Android, IPhone, Blackberry
> Quickest possible data point refresh rate: 5 seconds
>
> This is by far the easiest to setup. It involves registering an account on
> the website, installing the app on the phone, generating a key (unique
> identifier) on the website, entering the key in the app's settings and you
> are good to go. It gives you a fairly decent interface, with the track being
> overlayed on google maps. The statistics for each data point you can see is
> Latitude, Longitude, Altitude, Speed, Bearing, Time.
>
> The advantage to this method is that it's effectively clientless for crew
> etc. We had 3-4 different people across the state watching various flights
> live, none of them particularly computer savvy.
>
> It does also provide a basic API, allowing easy access to the latest data
> point, or optionally the last X datapoints. This is done via simple HTTP
> requests, which are documented on the website. I managed to throw together a
> script (Kixtart - only language i'm semi competent with) which every 10
> seconds polls the instamapper site using it's API to get the last datapoint,
> and add it to a KML file.
> Using the information provided from the API it was also possible to easily
> produce some other statistics such as climb/sink rate since last datapoint.
> The end result being the trace appears in google earth (3d) in close to
> realtime. If anyone wants the source, shoot me an email, it's nothing fancy.
>
>
> Option 2:
> ------------
>
> Application: GPSd
> Cost: Free (GNU, Open source i think)
> Supported Devices: As far as i can tell, only android has an easy to install
> GPSd Server component. I think with Iphones it is possible, but invovlves
> jailbreaking them and a fair bit of command line work.
> Quickest possible data point refreshes: I think as quick as the GPS can
> generate them - i was getting 1 every second.
>
> This method involves quite alot more work than option 1, and probably isn't a
> very good method. However it does allow 1 second refreshes and the end result
> allows you to effectively have a carbon copy of what the pilot sees on their
> PNA/PDA - XCSoar running on the desktop with the gps source being the phone's
> gps in the glider.
>
> GPSd is an open sorce project that can and has been ported to android that
> basically creates an open port on the host device, and is able to relay the
> raw output of the GPS to this port in plain text. For instance you can telnet
> to the phone on that port and see the NMEA sentences, similar to what you
> would get if you turned on Raw logging in XCSoar and looked that the output
> file.
>
> XCSoar requires a serial port to obtain it's NMEA sentences (GPS data), so
> the trick is then to create a virtual com port mirroring the contents of the
> telnet session. I was able to do this with a free product called Franson GPS
> Gate. The end result was i had a working copy of XCSoar on my laptop showing
> live data from the glider. From this i was able to see most stats - final
> glide, vario, L/D, altitude, speed, task etc.
>
> This method was quite alot of work. The service provider appears to NAT the
> 3g internet traffic from the phone. Because GPSd requires direct tcp access
> to the phone, port forwarding needs to be used. To do this i used a VPN
> provider ($10/month) to give the phone a publicly accessible IP Address, and
> then request the VPN Provider open the required port.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> Phone 3g reception was suprisingly good. I think the longest time i've seen
> between datapoints is about 6 mins, which is pretty good really. I'd estimate
> about 70% of the datapoints make it through over the duration of a flight.
> This is done without any passive/active antenna boosters etc, which would
> likley improve this.
>
> If anyone wants to try anything like this, keep in mind it does run the
> battery of the phone down pretty quick - a few hours will run it flat. I
> wired a female car-type socket into the car and used a 12v phone charger.
>
> Anyway, just thaught i'd jot down what i've found, it might save someone
> reinventing the wheel.
>
> Luke
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Special Offer-- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE (a $49 USD value)!
> Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free!
> Download using promo code Free_Logger_4_Dev2Dev. Offer expires
> February 28th, so secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY!
> http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsight-sfd2d_______________________________________________
> Xcsoar-user mailing list
> Xcsoar-user@lists.sourceforge.net
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcsoar-user
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Special Offer-- Download ArcSight Logger for FREE (a $49 USD value)!
Finally, a world-class log management solution at an even better price-free!
Download using promo code Free_Logger_4_Dev2Dev. Offer expires
February 28th, so secure your free ArcSight Logger TODAY!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/arcsight-sfd2d
_______________________________________________
Xcsoar-user mailing list
Xcsoar-user@lists.sourceforge.net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcsoar-user
