Thread: My GPS scenario & Bluetooth quest.

Originally Posted by SnyperBob

Hell, until this thread, I knew zero about bluetooth GPS. I thought bluetooth was for cell phone headsets and stuff. I'm a noob. If you have any more information about the receivers, or some more pics, please share.

Bluetooth is gaining increased support on laptops especially.. all Apple powerbooks now have bluetooth, also the mac mini.. my sony vaio t150 has it also.. its basically wireless connectivity over radio waves.. for the cellphone it's handy for the wireless headset.. but also you can connect your cellphone to your laptop/pda and transfer data.. but also on the laptop you can get bluetooth enabled mice.. and most importantly.. GPS is now available in bluetooth.. its non-directional, so you can basically have the GPS mounted on your dash, and a car-pc in the trunk (I believe it has that range w/o a problem) and it'll pair up.

Hopefully my information is accurate, and that does give you some more knowledge!

Yea, bluetooth is taking a while to catch on in the states, seems like many are still weary of its bugs and I can understand as I've felt a bit frustrated playing with it before. My current bluetooth devices are GPS, PDA, Carputer (w/$15 bt dongle), and headset - no, my phone isn't bluetooth but I sure as heck wish it was!! Verizon is so slack and the gimped v710 is a huge dissapointment...anyways, I'm getting off track. I believe bluetooth has tremendous potential, we just need it to become more mainstream so the damn prices on bt enabled devices would drop!

Off my mini soapbox, since using the nag screen fix, I noticed the problem with multiple windows opening when you use it in Centrafuse. Example, if you open up GPS, then go to music, then you want to go back to GPS, it attempts to open up another Iguidance window. Gonna go load up another code when I can to fix that, no biggie.

The Holux is doing fine, but I currently have to manually turn it on (and off if I want to save batteries). Right now, it's just sitting on the dash and plugged into the cigarette lighter adapter it came with. My cig lighter plug is on w/acc only, so when I leave the car, my GPS loses DC power and goes into battery mode. If I leave the car for too long, then of course the battery dies and when I return to the car, need to power it back on. I plan to hardwire a female cig lighter plug to the battery to use as my new power location (yes it would be easier to just wire the current one directly, but I want to keep it removable). What's nice about the Holux kit is that the usb lighter plug adapter can be used with anything that can be charged via usb! So it's very useful hehe.

As far as prospective bluetooth GPS units to consider, I did mention the Globalsat BT-338 above which has the newest SiRFstarIII chipset. There's a good review on it here: http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/bt338.php and you can find some good articles on how good the new chipset is. But remember, it's gonna cost ya more! Hehe. I'm not sure if there are any other SiRFstarIII chipset bt gps units out there - I'm kinda scared to look, makes me want better! Damn I hate technology.

I got my Holux 231 the other day, and its real nice! gets an immediate fix even without using an external antenna.. even worked inside my house not near a window.

One big pointer for anyone who gets it.. when installing it as a bluetooth device, the passkey for it is 6268 .. the documentation didn't mention that at all, thank god for