Discussion: GPS Replays

Hi Jagge, it's Bob Miller writing from Canada. You seem to be the resident expert when it comes to GPS loggers as well as GPS Replay hardware and software. I'm working on a project for the Candian Adventure Racing Association where we'd like to provide this functionality for our events. Originally I was thinking we'd buy a fleet of loggers, provide them to participants at events, collect them afterwards, download the tracks and make them available on replay software for participants to view (ideally in an interactive way where they could select which tracks to replay from a list of starters). However, it seems you have the technology to do this live as well as post-event? On the live gps tracking you've done, what devices are you using? Cell phones?

If going with my original plan of purchasing data loggers and replaying the routes post-event my questions would be:

1. Which Data Logger do you recommend that would have the following features:
-waterproof
-durable
-can track for up to 36 hours (at 5 second intervals)
-have an easy method for being carried that ensures decent data collection (arm-band, wrist-band, head band?)
-does not have a display

2. Are you familiar with any GPS Replay Software that has the following characteristics:
-can replay a track up to 36 hours in length (at 5 second intervals)
-has the capability to replay up to 200 tracks for a given event (not all tracks need to replay at once)
-up to 5 tracks (or more) can be replayed at a given time
-can accept geo-rectified maps as background images for the replay.

Ideally we'd like to host the replay software on our website, however if there was something already available online that works and looks good we'd consider that too.

Feel free to contact me offline if you'd prefer (robertwdmiller@yahoo.ca)

Thanks in advance for any advice you can provide.

I am afraid I can not help much, unfortunately. My interest has been in orineteering logging and replaying, that means seldom over 3 hour sessions, usually less than hour. No experince of logger capable of logging that long - I have repalved batteries to to more lightweight ones to those loggers running over 20 hours with original battery. Same applies to replay thing, apps I have written does not handle well or work at all with that long sessions, usually they interpolate missing points to get one second interval making things heavy for that long sessions.

For yökuppi live tracking we still use old (symbian s60) smart phones and with external bt gps. robust, works really well for couple of hours, but not somethng you should build on. I have no experience with dedicated trackers, I tried one device years ago but it did not work much at all.

Thanks for the feedback Jagge. I had a feeling the extended duration of the events may have caused issues for our application.