Well i havn't done testing outside of Central Qld, and Benalla, Vic
(Australia), but i have not had any significant issues with 3g reception,
both areas can probably be classed as rural. Have a look at this trace,
taken yesterday:
http://www.instamapper.com/trk?key=497486601143441278
On 21 January 2011 21:36, Scott Penrose <sco...@dd.com.au> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
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