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I have compared two GPS Apps for the Samsung Tablet which is now installed on my bike as a recording aid.

GPS STOPWATCH - has a large display on my tablet screen giving distance travelled to within 10 metres - great for warning of the approach of a split location.

GPSlogger for Android- has a tiny display - not easy to read without stopping, but combined with post-ride plotting using GPS UTILITY it gives very smooth detailed tracks.

See my new webpage. I will post some comparisons with my Garmin Etrex H later.
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Yes Mark, both android apps show distance travelled since reset. I would have to borrow my sons iPad or iPhone to compare with them. But I went out this morning and tested the following against the Jones counter on the bike:

Jones counter (no SCPF): 4.5131km
Garmin Etrex H trip odo: 4.48km ie -0.7%
Garmin Etrex H smoothed: 4.481km (points recorded at 1 sec interval and afterwards smoothed by GPS Utility with the maximum off track distance in the compression filter set to 2m.)
GPS logger app display : 4.57km ie + 1.3%)
GPS Stopwatch app : No record. Cumulative distance and gps track lost when talking photos & videos of counter reading at about 2 km. Had to restart the app.

It is possible that if I play with the GPS logger app settings I can reduce the +1.3%. I am recording every second and there are various options that need to be investigated. There is a distance filter and an accuracy filter, but from the description it is not obvious that these will help.

Any one of these devices will give a a sufficiently accurate indication of an approaching mile split that I could start monitoring the counter reading in the camera mode, and record the route well enough to identify roads so that a course map can be prepared.

The main thing I am having to learn and practice is switching between applications without messing up the recording of data. I am rather annoyed that for the second time in two days, I have lost data with the GPS Stopwatch app. I would prefer to use it since it has nice chunky screen display which I dont absolutely need glasses to read. The good thing from this mornings test was the videos and photos of the counter readings at the start/finish, and also on the calibration course worked perfectly.

May be I will end up building my own GPS recording app in order to closely match my needs.
Using GPS tagged Images in COURSE MEASUREMENT for Road Races


Here am I measuring at the finish line of the Bannister Mile yesterday morning.

My tablet mount is still a prototype - now made of plywood.

I have written a short report about my experiments using the geotagged counter readings to document my splits.



I would appreciate any suggestions for software which measurers can recommend for this type of work.
Mark,
For each mile mark I would like one pdf page (or half page) showing 3 pictures - counter reading from tablet photo, with its gps location on satellite view, and my camera photo of the mile reference surroundings. Plus a few words copied from my spread sheet to say the mile mark is so much distance from the reference.

I dont really want to use screen capture if I can avoid it since it generally needs an additional step of editing.

I am looking for a fast way of generating a pdf file of the pictures for the report.
I am unfamiliar with iphoto album, although my wife has it on her machine and I could take a look - can you give an example of its use.
That must have been a rather cold and somewhat icy measurement, Mark.

We are still using paper or pdf files for reports, so although I see the advantages of your nice web based pages for a race director who uses a smart phone to use during layout of the mile markers, I am hesitant to switch away from our present report standard with all info archived in a single pdf file.

I experimented with making a pdf file from your webpages, and after a small amount of fiddling with the settings on Adobe Acrobat Standard 8 on my PC I had a nice 12 page pdf with a single image and its caption on each page.

I played with my wife's iPhoto and found how to create an album, but although I could see the exif information, I could not work out how to get the selection which you have to appear under the photo with the location description which of course has to be typed. I could see the exif data in a panel on the side, but what do you ? Copy and paste?

I suppose there web publishing facility. I googled and found "Choose File > Export, and then click Web Page." It would be somewhat longwinded, but not impossible to dump the photo folder onto the iMac, produce a html album, then open that on a PC which has my Acrobat Standard and from that save the pdf, which subsequently I can integrate into my pdf report.

EDIT: I found the webpage export facility, saved the album on a USB (including the exif data). I then moved the USB to the PC with Adobe Acrobat and converted to PDF. Which looks very good - complete with the exifdata. So that looks to be the way to produce nicely laid out pdf pages.

Searching a bit more I see there is a photo gallery software called Piwigo which integrates with Shotwell which is the programme i have on my linux computer for filing photos. I will explore that so i dont have to use my wife's iMac. So thanks again for the tip.
Last edited by mikesandford

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