BT-CD110

BT-CD110 bluetooth data logger.

Brief review

Nice little unit. Battery life is great, well over the advertised 22 hours using stanby and motion detection (!), though there's no way to know what the current battery level is at, it will say "Low power" for the last hour of battery life. The voice feature was a surprise to me, I thought I'd be dependant on the merry blinking lights. Some of the sounds are kind of obnoxious (and it's kind of bizarre to have "satellite fix" come out of your pocket at random times).

In terms of getting a signal, it was a bit of a mystery, sometimes I couldn't get one after standing in a clear space, sometimes it'd lock on while in my pocket in the middle of the city. AGPS (assisted GPS, using mobile networks) would probably be much better, but require a different kind of device.

The included utilities for setup and downloading data are basic but work fine, including export to Google Earth format (of course, the actual data isn't exactly complex, so it's easy to do whatever transforming is required). It would have been nice to get ahold of an immediate GPS mapping app, but since I don't plan to run Windows going forward the only option is Google Earth, which is an extra expense option I'll consider paying for if nothing appears soon (ironically I paid for Google Earth when it was owned by Keyhole, Google immediately bought it and my subscription became worthless when they released it for free).

It would have been much nicer to have a GPS device that also included a display, but that would have been much larger, had much shorter battery life, cost a lot more for a device that will be shortly obsolete as there is so much happening in GPS, and would have required paying and managing maps for each new region. This $120 device is a good solution for simple logging.

I had considered the Locotech BGT-11 / Amaryllo Trip Tracker because there is more third party software and it's waterproof/floats, but it is a larger unit with shorter battery life, and the battery is non replaceable and apparently stops working if it goes flat. The BT-CD110 uses a commonly used replaceable battery.

2007 GPS experience

Issues

included driver isn't Vista compatible

The setup program thinks I am running Windows 2000 and am missing service pack 4, and the auto discover driver fails with "BT + GPS + DATA LOG - The system cannot find the file specified."

- fixed with an updated driver.

Bluetooth with utilities

Regarding Bluetooth, the device connects as "BT GPS" and shows up as COM3 (outgoing) / COM4 (incoming). When I use the basic "Set Data Log" utility, I either see "Cannot open COM3" or "Device can not into update mode, please try again." (grammar verbatim).

- have to use USB with these utilities.

Compatible software

Google Earth

- Exporting (via Data Log utility) to Google Earth's kmz works.

Related Sites

http://www.gpspassion.com/forumsen/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=91359 - usb / bluetooth with Vista

Resellers

http://www.mobilegpsonline.com/mgpsstore/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=4&products_id=463&zenid=f53ea5cd14fa18d55cdaf2a8905bd227 (Detang) - Ottawa, Canada

http://www.acesuppliers.com/company/information_33551.html

http://www.mijnwinkel.nl/shop4235/productlist4/?_globalsearch=1517

GPS experience 2007

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Blikied on Aug 24, 2007