Trackstick GPS Tracking

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SockMonkey

Makin' Some Noise
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Here's an interesting little device with lots of uses: Trackstick. I'd love to have this along on rides to help me remember those fun little roads I come across from time to time. (I see that there are also a few more "covert" applications alluded to as well...)

 
Most navigators today will log your data the same way and some cost a lot less than this device, though the bike specific ones are not in that price class. Passive data collection devices have their place, but I personally prefer to know where the kids (and other things) are NOW.

I stuck a cellular tracker in the car so I can keep track of my son's use - I can see where the car is and it logs the speed and such, plus it can e-mail me when the car moves and so on - on this year's road trip I stuck it under the seat of the bike - just in case someone wanted to make off with the ride - so, not only did the navigator get my travel details, friends could see where I was by logging in to a 'guest account' I set up at the provider's web site - and the tracker cost less than the Trackstick, though the subscription for it is $15/month.

Note that there are holes in the coverage with online cellular trackers (one advantage to the satellite-based SPOT, which also is cheaper than a Trackstick is that you are never 'out of range' unless you are under cover), but the GSM systems can communicate under cover, in parking garages and so on.

I've created two images from this summer's road trip. One comes from the tracklog in the GPS, which contains more than 54000 entries and includes altitude data, time & date as well as calculated speeds. The other is from the tracker's web site, which was set to report every 15 minutes and managed to deliver 924 reports - when in range. The exercise is interesting because it demonstrates the difference between local storage (seamless) and online connectivity . . . . as well, because the navigator posted a tracklog entry whenever things changed, there is very fine 'granularity' to the data, where the online data is pretty coarse. Score one for the Trackstick and for logging navigators.

These are thumbnails - to see the larger versions, just click the images:



 
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I don't bother, but it is simple to manually create waypoints and then transcribe (through cut and paste) from Mapsource to your photo data fields - or if you have photoshop or a similar program even to add a text box to the photos. Alternatively you can just copy the data out of the tracklog entry . . . that seems to be what trackstick does.

 
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