Bike tracking widgets

bornagainroadie

Not really a commuting topic but you folk are never short of opinions or experience so here goes....

I'm signed up to do a Pyrenean Raid in June and I plan to make it a sponsored event. In an attempt to engage my sponsors and make them feel a bit more involved in my discomfort I am considering buying some sort of "bike" tracker that can report its position several times an hour and have the location/trail be visible in a map I can embed on a website (or YouBookFaceTube). There seem to be numerous options here, all use GPS or fallback to cell tower triangulation for position detection and then SMS, GPRS(3G) or even satellite communications for position reporting. Surprisingly they are quite cheap though all require some sort of subscription to pay for the reporting part. I would like the map provider to allow me to limit the dates it creates the map from so I can use the same device for multiple events.

Has anyone gone down this route? I would welcome any first hand experience of these things. I'm thinking the having something I can embed on my own web site might be the tricky part as well as coverage in the Pyrenees.

Thanks for any pointers,
Nick

Pufftmw

Hi Nick

If it were in the UK, we could have done it for you. Previously, we have provided a pda to people, which sends back GPS co-ordinates every 30 seconds to our servers and is then displayed on our java based mapping system. We give the competitor a link for them to publish, which allows other people to track, in more or less real time, your current position. We've done a couple of Lands End/John O Groats and a couple of other smaller events. Unfortunately, we're currently only licenced for the UK as we don't cover Europe!

Have a look at www.gpsgate.com as that should probably do what you require. There may be others out there if you spend some time on Google.

The simple bit is getting the GPS and sending it somewhere (preferably by GPRS/3G) but there are potentially licensing and privacy issues with displaying positions on websites for all to see, which makes it more complicated/costly.

bornagainroadie

Thanks for the follow up, I will take a look at the link. There do seem to be numerous providers that aren't encumbered by privacy concerns but in general their presentation of the data collected is lacking a bit for my purposes.
Hard to imagine I have created a demand for something unique.

apreading

I think viewranger may be able to do something using 'buddy tracker' although I have yet to try it myself. Viewranger also do mapping in other countries so would probably work but would rely on you sending the data over the 3g network - which could be expensive overseas... Dont know if this is of any help.