Bluetooth GPS Navigation

The first Summer I drove from Federal Way to Phoenix for a vacation (2002), I purchased a Magellan GPS 310 handheld unit and a power/data cable from Wal-Mart with my employee discount. I had every intention of taking advantage of Wal-Mart’s liberal return policy as soon as I returned from my trip. I used the GPS receiver along with Eltima Serial Splitter for simultaneous 802.11b war driving with net stumbler and navigation with Microsoft Streets & Trips 2002. Since it worked so well for me, I decided to keep it.

Unfortunately, as of sometime in 2005, the GPS receiver started becoming unusable. Portions of the LCD screen will not appear, making it difficult to use. More importantly, it no longer obtains a reliable fix on all the GPS satellites, making tracking incredibly inaccurate if it even tracks at all.

Since my girlfriend and I were taking a trip down the California coast highway, which included making stops at various places in San Francisco, San Diego, Long Beach, etc, I figured I’d like to have the GPS navigation to tell us where we were. So the day before we left, we took a trip up to Fry’s Electronics in search of a new GPS unit. I came across a Socket GPS Nav Kit for PDA’s. Now, the box only mentioned PDA support — it said absolutely NOTHING about working on a PC, only a PDA. But, being bluetooth, I assumed it would just use the Serial Port Profile and output NMEA data. I purchased it, took it home, and opened the box.

To my surprise, the thing came with an internal, replaceable, rechargable LI-ON battery, an AC adapter with several worldwide plug adapters, a 12V DC Adapter, and an extension cord that will work with either adapter or power two units at the same time!

Anyway, I plugged it in, stuck it on my window sill, and turned it on. Within seconds it had already gotten a GPS fix even with the blinds closed and the river and trees near by! Sweet! I plug in the Bluetooth USB adapter I swiped from work and fired up Microsoft Map Point 2004. Map point could see the serial port, but wouldn’t receive any data from it. Worried that it wasn’t outputting valid NMEA data, I fire up HyperTerminal and open the Bluetooth Serial Port. Yep — it was definately NMEA data! Why wasn’t Map Point working???

Being this is a poorly programmed Microsoft application, I imagine it was simply timing out when opening the serial port (every time the port is opened, the “bluetooth wizard” must ask you for the PIN code then make the connection — very annoying). To solve this, I fire up the Serial Splitter program, make a few virtual serial ports out of the virtual bluetooth serial port, and try Map Point on one of the “split” ports. It works!! W00T W00T!!

By this time, my girlfriend was already in bed asleep… it was late, and I had just changed the oil on my car before the trip and was tired myself… but I had to install the software that came with it first. The software is this program called “My Navigator”. Apparenly, they also included a PC version of it in addition to the PDA version. I open up the program, configure it for the other virtual serial port, and it immediately shows my location. I enter a destination of Phoenix, AZ, and I hear screaming out of my speakers in a female voice, “Proceed to the nearest road.”

Sweet! Now I have voice guided directions to navigate me through our road trip!! The best part (and the worst part) about the voice directions is they automatically will reroute the trip if you miss a turn. I say the best part because when driving in downtown San Francisco up very steep hills with 4-way stops every intersection on 4 lane one-way streets, it was nice to accidently miss a turn and reroute us to the next turn. I say the worst part because as we were driving through the redwoods, I wanted to stay on the Pacific Coast Hwy (CA-1) instead of highway 101. We kept hearing the thing repeat it self along the lines of: “In 500 feet, make a U-Turn onto Road” … “Ding” … “In Point-Seven miles, make a U-Turn onto Road” … “In 700 feet, make a U-Turn onto Road” … “Ding” … etc etc until it finally gave up and rerouted us along the highway we were on.

So with my laptop hooked up to my car stereo playing mp3’s from Winamp, the voice directions, and Map point to find hotels and food all in conjunction with the Bluetooth GPS receiver, it sure made life much easier in driving through the roads of california! The GPS receiver outperformed my expectations and now I am definately not going to buy a new car without GPS navigation. It is certainly a time-saver and a paper-saver. Oh, and the GPS receiver even works with my Nokia 6230 using this software. Pretty sweet!