Thread: Google Earth GPS Tracking Solution

Originally Posted by Crazy A

can anyone recommend a good GPS reciever for this purpose?

I have a Globalsat BU-353 usb gps reciever and it worked amazing with GE. The only prob I had was that there weren't high-res photos for my town. I ended up sticking with M$ $treets and Trips '06. But if you live in an area that has really high res photos of your town/city, you'll love it.

bu-353:

You are the man, thanks for the tip

Motodude, this is Great!!

One question though: I was monitoring the KML file, and it seems that you update it roughly each 5 seconds, no matter what number I put in the GE settings option.

Is there a reason for this, and could you put the update frequency of the file as an option in the KML export option screen? I'd love to refresh the file each seconds, giving it a "smoother ride" ;-)

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

André

Originally Posted by MotoDude

Good idea, but if all you want to do is cache the data in your area, you can do this by creating a tour in GE.

If you have GE Plus, you can draw paths anywhere and fly along the paths. If you have GE free you can put a collection of placemarks into a folder and fly the tour from placemark to placemark. Put a bunch of placemarks into a folder and fly the whole folder. The order is top to bottom, as you ordered the placemarks in the folder.

It takes a lot of experimentation to get the results you would expect. At first you will experience "bunny-hopping" from placemak to placemark. This can be fixed by going to Tools -- Options -- Control -- Advanced. Set the Driving Directions Tour Options for a shallower camera tilt angle and longer range, and change the speed. Then set up a new tour and see if it's how you like it. It all takes a while to get the hang of.

Is this kind of what your after? It does get the data in your cache. You may also want to set your cache size to the maximum of 2GB. I've found that 2GB covers a pretty good sized area, but it does depend on the quality of the images in your area.

I tried this in the free one. Does not seem to work as expected and changing the flying specs only work for driving direction. I am attempting to write a script that generates nicely placed placements over an area so that playing a tour produce the results we are looking for, for cache a city. I will make the input a Lat and Lon as the center and a width and height that you want to cache in miles and it will generate an xml file or as google earth calls it a kml file that you can load into GE and then play the tour.

So, there is still no way to get GE working dloading first yor city maps before you start driving?

Hey! I am trying to nmeaGE, but the program seems to create kmls in a wrong format. Saw a nother guy having the same probs. on this link: http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat....0/fpart/3/vc/1

He had xp with german language/charset, I am running xp with norwegian language. Could this be the problem?

Heres some of his post:

...the KML file has a wrong format.

Instead of the following lines

<longitude>12.6254483333333</longitude>
<latitude>42.5243733333333</latitude>
...
<coordinates>12.6254483333333,42.5243733333333</coordinates>

the KML file contains these lines:

<longitude>12,6257416666667</longitude>
<latitude>42,52467</latitude>
...
<coordinates>12,6257416666667,42,52467</coordinates>

If you import the second KML file into Google Earth, longitude becomes "12" and latitude becomes "6257416666667".

Originally Posted by Bravellir

its the decimal point plague all over again

Hi Bravellir!

As you said I realized the problem... you are right.

bmw318ISCoupe, what you have to do is to replace all the decimal points with commas...

Eduardovdr