Using GPS to measure area

Question

Hey guys, I'm researching something for a friend of mine who's involved in road construction. He needs some sort of a device that he can use to measure distance or area between points. I have done some GPS programming in the past but for mobile devices and i wasn't too impressed with accuracy. That was quite a few years ago and i think the technology has improved, however i am not sure what device i should as the receiver. Since a mobile device would probably be out of the question because i'd need to be able to run my custom application on it, something that hooks up through a USB port would maybe work? I found u-blox PCI hard that works with laptops and PCs. Has anyone on here had any experience with it? Perhaps there are other devices i'd need to look into?

I appreciate any help i can get on this. Thank you.

Answer 1

If you really need to embed your own custom software, you could roll your own and go the Arduino route:

http://www.ladyada.net/make/gpsshield/

If processing the data later is an option I've found the AMOD AGL3080 to be a great bang for your buck data logger. The accuracy is very good once it's warmed up and it mounts like a disk on Linux, OS X and Windows where you can just pull the logs off and process them. You can use GPSBabel to convert them into whatever format you need, though the default is NMEA.

If someone else has a better solution I'd be curious to hear it too - affordable GPS toys for programmers seem hard to come by!

Answer 2

You could use a mobile device that has GPS and the ability to run your custom software like the iphone, google phones, and probably a lot of other smart phones.

Answer 3

As far as hardware I've had good experiences with this one (this is just a link to a model, I haven't bought it from them, so prices may differ significantly in your area) (similar appliance as your friend). Of course, relating to accuracy, you need to talk of exact numbers. If standard gps accuracy is not good enough for you, maybe differential gps could do more for you (suggest you google "dgps").

As far as software goes, I used terminal go get raw data, and then using my own programs, analyzed and plotted it. Not sure what you need exactly, tell more.

(p.s. This model is pretty rough, not just once it fell off the top of a moving car, and it still works :)