Performance of GPS Apps for Android

Thanks for that Mike. Do either of the apps you used show you distance traveled? It would be interesting to see if they are any more accurate than the iPhone apps.

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.

Mike,
It's not clear to me what you would want the software to do.
I use iPhoto to create a webpage of my "album" of mile mark photos. I'm sure there are other photo handling apps that will do that.

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.

This is what I sometimes provide.
http://www.dukerdog.com/USATF/...eekend_Warrior/Half/
A race director can bring this page up on his phone while he's on the course. If he clicks on a picture he gets a larger picture and a description of the mile mark. I think you can also put a title on each picture. Not sure why I didn't do that for this one.

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.