• Bluetooth : To use a Bluetooth, first make sure that Bluetooth is switched on in your device and that eGPSTrack has been granted permission to use Bluetooth connections. Select the menu option GPS / bluetooth , press Search " button and wait some time for a list of detected Bluetooth devices. Use cursors to move to the desired device an select it pressing 'use' button. You will then return to the Configuration Screen where the name of the external GPS will be displayed.
• Internal : To use an internal GPS receiver, select the menu option GPS / internal. Note that an internal receiver can only be used if the J2ME run-time platform on your device includes the optional package JSR-179. Also note that support for internal GPS receivers has only been recently added to eGPSTRack, so this feature could be unstable.
• Serial : To use a serial connected GPS receiver, select the menu option GPS / Serial. You must enter some connection parameters, including the port name and the communication speed. For instance, when using the HGE-100 (tested on eGPSTrack ) you must specify 'at5' as the port name and 9600 as the communication speed. Check the manual of your GPS device to obtain the correct settings.

Folder

Select the Folder option to choose a folder (directory) in which track logs will be stored. This folder will also be used in Map Screen to load maps. eGPSTrack has a built-in file browser (see image below) for navigating through the file system and for selecting files and folders.

File selector

Log time

Select the Log time option to set the frequency with which eGPSTrack writes GPS position samples to the track log file. To be precise, this option specifies the time in seconds between each two consecutive position samples that are written to the log file. You will have to adapt this parameter to the expected speed with which you will be travelling. For instance, if you are travelling by car, a 60-second log time interval will result in a poor track resolution. If you are travelling on foot, on the other hand, a 1-second interval will generate a track log with a lot of similar points.

Transparency

Use the Transparency option to determine how eGPSTrack should draw some graphics with a transparency factor. The option may slow down the screen updates, especially on slower devices. Disable this option to speed up the screen updates.

Units

Use the units option to change the units used for reporting distances and velocities. This option also determines the units in which tracks are exported.

Display Type

Information showed in GPS screen or Statistics Screen can be displayed using simple text or by means of numbers drawn simulating a LCD display.

The GPS screen

The GPS screen shows the data currently obtained fron the GPS receiver, incuding your current position, altitude, speed and direction; see the image below. Pressing the Fire button starts or stops the reception of GPS data.

GPS Screen

The displayed data are obtained directly (that is, without further processing) from the NMEA183 information sentences received from the GPS receiver. eGPSTrack tries to use the quality values provided by the GPS receiver to ensure that the displayed data are correct. In spite of this, however, erroneous data may be displayed in some occasions. Improving the robustness of eGPSTrack in this respect is an important aspect of the ongoing development.

This screen supports the following extra key bindings:

The Statistics screen

The Statistics screen shows information about the active and loaded tracks. This information includes the total distance, the accumulated ascended and descended distance, the average speed (excluding the time that the speed was zero) and the accumulated average speed (equal to the total distance divided by the total elapsed time).With th left / right cursor keys you can cycle through the loaded tracks.

Statistics Screen

As shown in the image, the accumulated average speed can sometimes be larger than the average speed. The reason for this discrepancy is that the accumulated average speed is computed from the position information and the elapsed time, while the avreage speed is computed from the velocity information obtained from the GPS receiver. In particular, eGPSTrack properly accounts for differences in altitude when computing the total distance, while the GPS receiver may omit altitude changes from the velocity information that it provides.

The Tracks screen

The Tracks screen enables you to manage tracks. You can create new tracks, load old tracks, unload tracks and export tracks. Track logs are stored in the NMEA183 format, and they can be exported to GPX and KML files; see Export Section for more information. You can use the program GPS Babel to convert a track to other formats.

Track log files are created with the name given at the moment of creation. eGPSTrack doesn't perform any checks if a file exists, so be careful not to overwrite an existing file unintendedly. Track logs will be created inside the folder configured in Configuration Screen.

New

Select the New option to create a new track log. After you have entered the name of the log, a new file will be created. The icons in statis bar, will notify you about status changes; once new track has been created, a green icon will be displayed. From this moment, when a connection has been established with the GPS receiver, information will be stored in the track log and the track statistics will be updated with the configured rate. Pressing the the Star key in the Tracks screen will pause the capture of position information. To stop the capture permanently, you must unload the track (see below).

Load

Select the Load option to load an old track log. It is possible to load a track log generated by another program, as long as the track log is stored in the NMEA183 format.

Track Loader

Unload

Select the Unload option to unload a track and remove all related data from the working memory of eGPSTrack. This option will not delete any track log files stored in the filesystem.

Export

Select the Export option to export a track log to another format. The supported formats are:

Currently supported formats are:

Google Earth Visualitzation

Maps

Calibration

eGPSTrack has its own format for calibrated maps, you can use the online eGPSMap generator to generate them, but if you already have raster maps,, you can manually convert them to a file that can be read by eGPSTrack. The formay of this file is straightforward, as illustrated in the following figure.

eGPSTrack-0.4
garriga.jpg
41.68645 N, 2.2920 E
41.68045 N, 2.3000 E

First line must be the literal ' eGPSTrack-0.4 '.

The second line must contain the file name of the map image¹.

Next two lines contain calibrations data: the coordinates of the upper-left corner (in the example `` 41.68645 N, 2.2920 E '') and the lower-right corner (`` 41.68045 N, 2.3000 E ''), respectively. The coordinates must be specified in the Decimal degree format.

Note that the file must have the extension `` .egt ''.

Application doesn't implement automatic Datum conversions. Map calibration and GPS device must be in the same Datum , generally WGS84. If configuration of GPS differs, information shown in application (like distances) will be erroneus.

Map Screen

To view maps and the active tracks, select button Map on main menu. In this screen, left buton are enabled to load egt files , click it and select the desired file, once selected, map will be shown, remember that in this version, in some devices, you may be asked some times for grant permissions over filesystem acces. Currently, loading is performed without any progress bar, please be patient because, depending on image size, loading could take some time.

Map view

In this screen , the tracks are drawn with points, the color of each one will change to inform about direction of trekk . On upper-left corner an arrow will show the actual direction. On upper-right corner, the list of track will inform, with its color, which track is which.

The extra controls available in this screen are :

When the ruler is enabled, a grid is drawn, and the distances between lines are informed by the bottom-left number.

Currently behavior implemented to center tracks doesn't performs zooms, for this reason, perhaps after press 5 no tracks are showed, in this situation, zoom-out key 9 must be pressed, because track is centerer but outside of view due current zoom level.

Elevation Map

In Map Screen, when combination star + 5 are pressed, the Elevation map is shown or hidden.

Elevationmap 1

Elevation map 2

The graph is painted with the altitudes logged in each track. If more that one track are loaded, you can move beetwen its elevation maps pressing left or rigth scroll buttons. In the midle of elevation map, a label will show the name of current track displayed.

Graph shows altitudes proportionally to height of displayed box, minimum level is set at 0 (sea level)

Waypoints

It's possible to insert waypoints manually in current trekk logging, by means of pressing key Star in GPS screen , the waypoint will be inserted in log file using current position provided by GPS. Application will ask for a name for the point. This name is showed in Map Screen (with the combination star + 6 labels can be enabled or disabled)

Waypoints view

1. PNG, JPG, GIF image types are supported. The size of the map is restricted by the available memory in the Device, on a Nokia 6230i, where this application has been tested, maps larger than 800x600 are loaded without problems. On a N70 images with a size of 1024x1024 can be used satisfactorily.