GPS and fieldwork?

[Aidan Wilson]

David Nash showed off to me his new gps data logger, called a Gisteq 
Phototracker Mini, but there's a bunch of them, ranging from about US$50 to a 
couple of hundred I think, and there are other brands offering similar things.

Basically you can tell it to record a journey (the distance between waypoints 
user-settable from about 15m to 1000m), or you can click it and record a 
waypoint manually. When you upload the data to a computer, it shows you the 
waypoints separate from the recorded journey.

I gave it a quick go, trying to get the data off, because it's apparently just 
gpx files, which are readable from a bunch of different programs, including 
google earth. However I had immense difficulty. As David explained, the model 
he bought doesn't mount; you have to have the software to import the data, 
whereas other models (he mentioned one made by Sony) do mount and you can 
therefore drag and drop the datafiles.

Just another suggestion.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

The University of Sydney
+612 9036 9558
+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at usyd.edu.au

On Sun, 23 May 2010, Felicity Meakins wrote:

> I have a camera with an inbuilt GPS which is quite good, though of course
> you have to remember to take some photos close-up to get an accurate
> reading.
>
> You could also talk to AAPA in Darwin. I gave them coordinates for a number
> of Dreaming tracks in Bilinarra country and they did up some fantastic maps
> for me mapping the coordinates.
>
>
> On 21/5/10 9:13 PM, "Nick Thieberger" <thien at unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
>
>> I have a Garmin GPS 60 and I find it easy to use. In conjunction with
>> a digital camera its track information can geocode images (using,
>> e.g., myTracks2 or similar software) based only on the shared
>> timestamps of the images and the GPS data. It is of course yet another
>> device that needs batteries, but it could also be considered a
>> necessity for remote location and off-road travel.
>>
>> Nick
>>
>> On 21 May 2010 11:35, Greg Dickson <munanga at bigpond.com> wrote:
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I'm in the process of putting together my equipment wishlist for fieldwork
>>> in Northern Australia and was wondering if I should think about taking a GPS
>>> with me.  I've never actually used one before, but was thinking it could
>>> come in handy, especially if we wanted to do things like mapping Dreaming
>>> sites/sacred sites.
>>>
>>> Does anyone have any advice or experiences to share about the usefulness of
>>> GPSes in fieldwork?
>>>
>>> Guda,
>>> Greg Dickson
>
>
>