Digital Rust

My Oregan 200 is truly a great piece of electronics

In theory I should be able to locate my position anywhere on the planet within a few metres, even 20 years ago people would have laughed at such claims.

For the purposes of this page I will dig a bit deeper into it's mysterious workings as I discover them.

To start with you need to acquire a good quality map of your country, Garmin sell them at nearly 120 quid but with a bit of looking around there are alternatives ;-))
Using the device menu, load your new map and the difference is astonishing.

Switch it on and go for a long walk in the middle of nowhere, your route will be recorded along with elevation, speed, direction etc.

But what use is this to me Ched ?

Have a look at the screen grabs on the right ( click in the expand box for a larger image ).

My Oregon leaves a "breadcrumb trail" by stamping it's position every minute or so. I put the Oregon in my rucksack and it keeps a track of a whole load of info about where I have been.

In this example I travelled south from Albuquerque down Interstate 25, through Socorro and headed west on HWY 60 to the VLA telescope array.
Each of the blue squares represents a measurement the Oregon GPS recorded along the way. They appear to be very close together as the journey was over 200 miles and google earth has tried to squeeze them all onto this one screen

The file on the right is the one you will need to follow the tutorial outlined below

Alb2VLA_17Oct09.kmz

If you want to follow the trail in the example below ( go on.......it took me ages to build ) then just download the file above right called Alb2VLA_17Oct09.kmz Get the latest version of google earth ( it is free ) and double click on Alb2VLA_17Oct09.kmz

Google earth will start and you should see the screen shown on the right ( click the expand button for a hi-res view )

Scroll down the left hand column and right at the bottom you will see under your "places" box a section called "temporary places" that contains the GPS data we will follow. You should see a track of the GPS data overlayed on the map. If you cannot see this overlay right click on *.KMZ or temporary places.

Click on the blue text "Alb2VLA_17Oct09

right click on "path" and you should see a red line appear showing the path data recorded on the GPS

I know it's a bit convoluted but it is the way things are at the moment.

On the right are a few screens that I have zoomed into for demonstration purposes only. Click the expand button for a larger view that opens in another window

You will have to click on the expand button to see this clearly

On the right you have part of the data recorded by the Oregon including an index datum, time, altitude, leg length ( i.e the distance between each "breadcrumb", leg time, leg speed, my course and position information.

At the bottom is a summary of this data telling me I travelled 205 miles, my trail was recorded for 9 hours and 43 seconds, my average speed was 23 mph and calculated area traversed was around 361 square miles from 1295 datum points.

Here is the elevation data my Oregon recorded along with the datum points ( shown as yellow dots ). The VLA is around 7000 - 8000 feet acording to the visitors centre. You can see my GPS thinks it is somewhere in between this

The graphic has this symmetry in it as I left it recording for a while after leaving the site, hence the mirror image as I went back the way I came.

Here is another trail for Monument Valley near Arizona. Just click on the file GPS_MValley.kmz and this should start google earth and you can follow the tutorial given earlier.