Another source of GPS data is available. Outdated, too :)

I bought a different receiver, Holux GR-236, three years ago for some EGNOS support (this is a true SiRF III unit after all), and compact size. My smartphone, HTC TyTN, already was a good candidate to collect raw NMEA data via Bluetooth. Just think about those gigabytes on the memory card!

Initially SirfTech was enough as a logging application. A year ago I made my own logger, an extremely simple thing with everything hardcoded, and therefore rock stable at last.

To preview NMEA stream, GpsBabel was also OK. Back then it required you to choose a single particular sentence from which the data will be extracted. That means some less popular parameters like "sats", "hdop", etc are lost. Nevertheless I always wanted to see all NMEA content, up to the current constellation even, in a nice tabular form. Almost coincidentally I started coding a parser, basically as some OOP exercise; though the project was perpetually stalled, some minimal version began to work just recently.

So it is now possible to convert those ~60 additional logs (40 MB in tabular form) to GPX. Just in time because there are almost none from year 2007, and the main data set from that year is finished, too.

This time file names will be simply timestamp-based and not numbered.

Accuracy should be worse, though I didn't test that.

In the car, the receiver sits as far as possible under the windshield, there is no coating or active antenna on the glass, however that's still obviously worse than the roof.

While on foot, I keep the receiver in my satchel that has a nice outside compartment for small mobile phones. That way the antenna almost always faces horizon (not zenith), which is not good but still better than a complete chaos in a pocket or elsewhere. Those patch antennas are not omnidirectional, you know.

On the bike there is a perfect place: the handlebar. Held with a few rubber bands, of course.