So what do you do with a Holux GPSlim240 or a Holux M241 GPS Logger? Well, I bought them before I had a reason. Yes, thats exactly like me. First I bought the world’s smallest bluetooth receiver Holux GPSlim240. It reached without trouble in 7 days. I worked with it for a about 2 weeks. Used mGMaps on my K790i. Later also installed Nav4All. That was what I thought to be fully loaded until my bro vivek told about the M241.

The Holux M241 GPS Logger is high end system for those who know how to use it. For silly people it simply comes with a LCD to let you see the latitude, longitude, altitude, speed, time and total distance traveled. So yes, you don’t need a bluetooth receiver at all times. For utter crazy dude like me, it can log. That alone is the super duper system to be used in so many ways. Welcome to openstreetmaps project. The ride has just started boys!

OpenStreetMaps is a great project for its letting anybody map their locality. In the case of INDIA, Google or Yahoo both have very bad quality satellite images and that too more than 2 years old. The locality where I live is mostly empty lands on google earth while in reality there are like 5000 apartments around. I started OSM after 3 weeks back when I had bought my first GPS receiver, Holux GPSlim240. It worked great (almost). I installed loads of softwares on my K790i and started playing with it. First I installed mGMaps. Its a mapping tool to render maps or terrain from various sources. When I first found out about mgmaps it could even render GMap. Now it can render everything but gmap. Haha. The interesting thing is that it can even render OpenStreetMaps along with wikimapia. mgmaps is great software and u can actually use it to travel to ur destination as it can hook to a bluetooth GPS and show position in realtime! (DO NOT USE IT WHILE DRIVING!). You can add bookmarks and zoom or pan around the map just like it were a web browser. Finally, mgmaps also supports realtime upload of the position. Therefore, if my profile can be accessed, you could even track me in realtime. My phone with the GPRS will keep uploading the coordinates to the mgmaps server. mgmaps also supports a great new function of friends. It will getting coordinates of all of its friends and display them on my phone’s screen. Same way will display my position on my friend’s mobile screen. The next amazing software for realtime GPS navigation is Nav4All. Nav4All is also a J2ME application just like mgmaps and works perfect even for my indian roads. Certainly it does not have all the roads that we know but it is growing. I don’t think its using OSM or any known data sources. It comes with a big bunch of audio languages and has a clever UI. Supports Night mode display as well has Economy intelligence over it for saving the mobile battery. Nav4all also supports uploading the points to the server but I have not tested its realtime engine. Then I tried to use GPSed. Its a data logger software which will write the info into a file on ur phone after it gets points from the bluetooth GPS device. The problem with GPSed is that on my phone it is very CPU hungry. Most often it responds very slowly and secondly on my phone it rarely succeeds in writing data to the file. At the end of the session when I want to save all logs it has failed everytime. Im not sure that this is cause of the security settings or not but I could not use GPSed very nicely. Besides that, it does have fearures to upload the log to its server. That is when I needed the Holux m241 Data Logger, the thing needed for GPS Tracing.

Openstreetmaps has been contructed in many ways. One of the very common methods for mapping has been GPS tracing. Since no overlay map can show a locality better than you being their yourself, collecting the GPS traces will allow you to later map your path even without the need of any satellite imagery. For my case its the only solution since my locality is no where seen in the satellite maps. I collected lots of traces from the m241 and later converted them to GPX format. OSM accepts GPS traces ibn GPX format. The Holux download utility that comes with the driver CD allows changing the log type from TRL into KML, NMEA and GPX formats. That is what I upload to see my trace on the mapping toll (either Potlatch or JOSM).

I will continue this blog for next few days with lots and lots of links cause I did not get all those in one location.