GPS Hardaware

Garmin Geko 201 and Magellan eXplorist 300 were used to collect way-points and tracks.

The Magellan eXplorist 300 has a larger screen, better radio reception, and improved abilities to pan and review tracks and screens.

The Garmin Geko 201 is easier to use, has more intuitive software, and is smaller and uses less power. But its greatest advantage is the ability to interface to a PC computer through the serial port and move data to and from the computer. The Garmin can communicate using multiple protocols, including the Garmin protocol, the NMEA protocol and TEXT.

GPS Data Collection and Manipulation

Data collection from the Geko 201 used GPSMAN, as well as GPSD and GPSBabel, on Ubuntu Linux operating system.

Data manipulation was accomplished by the export function of GPSMAN (export to GPX) and conversion function of GPSBabel (from GPX to KML). KML files are displayed using Google Earth.

Digital Images

Camera images were taken with a Canon PowerShot A610. Computer image capture was done with SCROT or with the image capture tool offered by Ubuntu. Image manipulation was primarily done with kolourpaint, another KDE program somewhat similar to MacPaint.

Server

Our server runs Ubuntu Linux Server 7.10, on a Celeron 700 mHz processor with 384 MB RAM. The web server is Apache2. MySQL, PHP and Python are installed as well, making it a typical LAMP system.

Web Content and Design

We use PmWiki to present the GPS site's content. PmWiki is a wiki software, written in PHP, which allows for user edited content generation as well as granular control over content at the page, group and site level.

Page created on: 2008-01-10

To add locations, use the Users Contributions group. To add content requiring file uploads (tracks or pictures), email GPSadmin at words2u dot net.