[nylug-talk] OT - city wide GPS question???

[Gary Mort]

Bob Mariotti wrote:
> Fellow luggers;
> I am a big fan of gps gizmo's in my car.   But, as one who has a 
> relative newly relocated to the Big Apple, I was thinking that a helpful 
> gift might be a handheld gps device geared towards the pedestrian.
>
> I saw advertised recently one by Mio, the digi-walker H610.  It claims 
> that it is a combo mp3 player/voice/video GPS unit for the person "on 
> the go".
>
> Therefore, as most geeks are gadget gurus, someone must have some 
> experience with city aware gps's.   So, if ANY of you reading this have 
> experience using hand-held gps for finding and walking directions, 
> please commend.  
>   

My wife just got a TMobile Dash.  I fiddled around a bit with Navison,
but it doesn't run on the Dashit yet.

The nice thing about Navison is you don't need any GPS, it can position
itself based on WiFi networks and/or Cell Towers provided the database
is loaded(how does the database get loaded?  By people who DO have GPS
devices attached to their pocket pc's.  It correlates the GPS data with
the cell towers in the area and any wireless networks in the area.).

To encourage people to give them the data, they give out points to
people for finding wireless networks and Cell Towers, and when you get
enough points they claim they will give out cash(what is to stop someone
from setting up a wireless router to go and run through 10,000 SID's
with different MAC addresses I don't know.  I assume they do so
verification.)

Of course, if one can figure out their protocols, one could go and write
a program for Linux to tie into their network and pull down data over
WiFi and determine GPS data.

Another interesting app is Flickr has a database of CellTower locations
setup and if you use their photo posting software from your cell
phone(small number supported) they will tag the photo with the cell
tower it came through - thus allowing you to have a geographical map of
all the pictures you took.