mapping, gps and hill towns

Many months ago Don and I were talking about Location Based Services on cellphones using the inbuilt GPS receivers. GPS is certainly the next big thing. But i'm just not so much into mobile programming and services. Maybe something more to do with distributed computing or massively parallel data collection would help.. And so the conversation went many places.. GPS receivers in phones to track networks.. demographics.. heat maps, and so on.

Then about 2 months ago he talked me into getting a BoostMobile Prepaid Phone in order to install and use Mologogo, which is a GPS phone tracking/friend findingsocial networking Java application. It was pretty cool and nifty.. but I found it little too buggy to use.. and not enough people on the network! However, it is interesting to see how GPS in phones is becoming ubiquitous now, except that the service providers haven't taken full advantage of it yet.

My main goal with this phone was to see if I could log the gps coordinates as I traveled. But I couldnt.. not with this phone. Maybe I could if I got into some serious Java programming but i don't have the time or the inclination.

Plus another huge factor: The phones run APGS, which stands for Assisted GPS, which means that some of the GPS work is done by the cellphone network.. so the cellphone service has to give you access to the GPS receivers in the phones. Not all providers do that. In the US, as far as I know, it's only Sprint/Nextel. I don;t know about India. I should find out when I'm home this time.

But finally, to get to the meat of the matter; the reason I wanted to log the gps coords is... I want to create maps.

Now, the wiser man might ask why on earth would I want to create maps. It's not like I'm back in the late 1800's and the Great Game where it becomes crucial to map uncharted territory. Beat the Russians and all that.

But I still want to... I've been thinking of this idea for a long time now and my tentative forays into messing with GPS and researching it is starting to show me some direction that I might be able to go towards. The ideas are all hazy right now. But the bottom line is that, for the greater good, we need maps. And when I say we, I mean we small hill towns of the Himalayas. For planning and development and finally progress. And I am going to figure out how to provide it, on the cheap, using technology and the power of the collective.

Hill Towns... I like.

I received my NaviGPS BGT-11 GPS Receiver and data Logger in the mail today. I charged it up and now it's trying to locate some satellites. It's having a hard time coz it's indoors next to the window right now. But I'm tres excited about it. And that's what brought about this post.
I thought I'd write a review of the BGT-11 after playing with it, but there are some good ones out there already. here and here and here also (kinda). And you'll see that the last link is from OSM.. Get my point?? wink wink.

I'll post more on my travels and travails with this scheme of mine. My next post will probably be from another continent. :D..