anderswallin.net » gps

Another Nokia N9 vs. Garmin GPS test

admin — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 09:54:37 +0000

These results are much like my previous ones. Close to buildings or other difficult places the N9 GPS performs significantly worse than the Garmin. This is somewhat surprising since the N900 performs very similar to a Garmin. Could better GPS-data on the N9 be just a software-update away? When is someone going to try to get TJ Lindfors's RTK-GPS Openmoko hack to work on the N9 ?!

Nokia N9 vs. Garmin Edge 800 GPS Test

admin — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:37:21 +0000

My legs aren't exactly recovered from Saturday's marathon, but a slow 5k jog anyway today. Sports Tracker was released for the N9 last week (or was it earlier?), so I thought I'd do some GPS testing. Held Garmin Edge 800 in my right hand and the N9 in my left. The results aren't that great for the N9:

I should do a test on the bike later. Maybe include the Garmin 405cx and older C7 phone also?

The touch-screens on these devices are different: Edge 800 works fine with gloves, N9 doesn't work at all with gloves.

Nokia N900 vs Garmin Edge800 GPS comparison

admin — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 07:59:02 +0000

On Wednesday I had a Garmin Edge 800 (red line in the pics) on my bike while Risto was using a Nokia N900 (blue line). Here are a few comparisons of the GPS-traces. Our bikes were obviously not exactly following the same route, so that accounts for some of the differences. The Edge800 seems to take GPS-samples a more often than the N900.

See also N95 vs 405cx testing here and here.

a good servant but a bad master?

admin — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:02:06 +0000

Seen on the bus today:

Yep, that's a GPS-screen top left. No need for the driver to know left from right, where the bus is, the route, or think much anything any more.

Back in the Good Old Days if you took a taxi the driver was actually supposed to know where you were going. Not so any more, especially at the airport. Given an address, the driver will probably not know which city or suburb to go to. After you write down your address on a piece of paper (been there, done that), since the driver speaks neither of our domestic languages, the journey proceeds exactly along the GPS trail. If they do the same with buses, install satellite-navigation everywhere, will it be good or bad?

How long before someone drives a bus into the water or off a cliff?

161 km gps-runs in 2009

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:37:31 +0000

Sunday 8k

admin — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 10:57:38 +0000

Any snow and ice that was on the streets is gone again and +4C with little wind is quite ideal for running. 8.10km in 54 minutes makes for a leisurely 6:46min/km pace.

9k jog

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:08:55 +0000

I haven't completely forgot to exercise, but the lack of daylight and cold temperatures make it, at least mentally, a bit harder to get out there and run.

Garmin 405cx aboard an IOM

admin — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:50:18 +0000

The 405cx gps-watch is small and light enough to just tape to the aft-deck of an IOM. Today's event in Tampere had 12 races but I missed a few due to electrical problems. Races 1 and 2 above, and races 7-12 below. It's funny how google-maps and google-earth show permanent winter and ice in Tampere

The raw-data (tampere_gpsdata.zip) is available in TCX format as well as Google-earth KML format from the garmin connect website.

Anyone have any software or matlab code to extract the instantaneous speed from this data and plot it? Might be useful for further CFD investigations or VPP-programs. Mostly light and shifting no1 rig the whole day. It will be interesting to compare with no2 and no3 rig in a real breeze.

Are there even smaller and lighter GPS-dataloggers? How long before we can have a GPS on every boat and watch playback of the race afterwards at home?

8k run

admin — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:09:48 +0000

An easy jog home from work. The Garmin has an auto-lap feature which takes lap-times each kilometer.

This time the N95 trace (yellow) seems less jumpy, but there's still a difference compared to the Garmin:

Garmin: 8.28 km in 50 min 50 s, 633 kcal
N95: 8.35 km in 50 min 55 s, 731 kcal

A second GPS test

admin — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:31:05 +0000

A secodn GPS test, this time with the 405cx on my left wrist and the N95 in my right hand. I had hoped this would expose the N95 antenna and improve its performance. Not so. The red trace (405cx) still looks much better while the yellow one (N95) jumps wiggles and snakes around. The summaries are:

N95: 8.30km in 53 min 13 s, 727 kCal
405cx: 7.92 km in 53 min 31 s, 627 kCal

If you zoom in, the N95 has me walking on water. To be fair the 405cx also looks a bit lost at the beginning of the run (far right), but it does get the street-crossing spot on (middle-right in the pic).

Then for a straight bit along 'Nokia avenue':

That's not pretty. I guess you could argue that on the way out (top) the street has tall houses on both sides, so the N95 (yellow) has a hard time finding satellites, while on the way home (bottom) it's more open and both GPSs perform roughly the same.

Here's part of the route in more open terrain. That seems to confirm that the N95 needs wide open spaces to do well.

For the record, my N95 8GB runs V 15.0.015 firmware (which I've several times unsuccessfully tried to update with Nokia PC-Suite ) and I'm using Nokia Sports Tracker v2.06 (S60 3.1). Today I had GPS-filtering turned off in sports tracker.

Somewhat surprising results! I would have thought GPS-positioning is a plain-vanilla technology by now and every company does it with equivalent hardware and software. Apparently not, or the N95 antenna is really inefficient, or I'm doing something wrong...