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Off-Road Navigation with GPS Fugawi Global Navigator 3.3.1(2)
By admin | June 10, 2007
Introduction
While there has been much excitement around using the latest convergent devices with built-in GPS to navigate the sometimes confusing streets of our cities, there is another use of these devices ‘off road’ – for hiking, biking, cache-hunts, etc.
Topographic maps for the US are available from a number of sources for GPS-enabled PPC’s, but very few carry Canadian maps. (Yes, there’s always Google Earth, but sometimes you need actual maps). Pleasantly, Fugawi’s Global Navigator does, indeed, carry Canadian maps!
Global Navigator is mainly a PC-based product which also includes a subset application for Pocket PC and Palm OS PDAs. While most of the fun stuff (like 3D depiction of terrain) is located in the PC application, this review will focus on features of the PDA version.
Installation
To install the PDA software, you need to install Global Navigator on the desktop/laptop first, run the program, establish an Activesync connection to the PPC, then select a menu item in the PC application. The PPC version is relatively small (approximately 500Kb) and installs quickly. Along with the software a default map of the world is also provided.
Figure 1: The main screen of the PPC version of Global Navigator, with the default World Map loaded.
On my HTC Galaxy, Global Navigator found the built-in GPS receiver without any problems and started communicating right away. I’m not sure if this was because of fortuitous default configuration settings or intelligence built into the software. (I suspect the former) On my Eten X500, it required a bit more work to get things talking to each other, since the X500 uses one COM port for the hardware to talk to the GPS unit, and a different one for programs to receive GPS data. The advantage of the Global Navigator software is that it contains sufficient variety in its available configuration parameters to handle these situations quite easily.
Figure 2: Configuration screen for Global Navigator to talk to the GPS.
To get things working properly, you may have to adjust the baud rate (connection speed) to the GPS unit, as Fugawi defaults to 4800 and many units can handle 9600 or higher. After a bit of experimentation, I was able to get the X500 happily sending data to Fugawi as well (at 56700 baud). Another useful tool provided by Global Navigator to ensure the GPS is working well is the display of the NMEA log.
Figure 3: The NMEA log display (available from the GPS menu. When everything is working properly, you should see some relatively intelligible data running past.
…to be continued…
Source: pocketpcthoughts.com
Topics: Computers & Software |