GPSGate
GpsGate allows a GPS device to be shared by multiple applications.
- Developer : Franson
- License Type : Commercial with 14 day trial
- Opensource : No
- Target platform : Pocket PC and Windows
- Price: Depends on volume, but for one-off $12.95 for Express and $39.95 for Standard
Features
- Redirect GPS input to virtual serial ports, Bluetooth and others
- Can handle multiple GPS inputs
- Optional filtering of GPS NMEA data
- Recording and playback of NMEA data
- GPS simulator
- 'GPS in browser' bookmarklet
The Express version can only feed two applications and lacks recording/playback/simulation options.
Applications
This application is very useful if you want to run a route finder, e.g. Tomtom, as well as logging the route in another application.
If any application is having problems handling the volume of GPS data, e.g. on a slow PDA, then it can be filtered to only include the essential GPS data and to only pass it on at given intervals.
The 'GPS in browser' bookmarklet [1] reportedly works with OpenStreetMap. Whether that means it works with any OpenLayers powered slippy map is not clear. Also this forum post suggests that it doesn't work, but that we might change our homepage to enable it somehow.
http://www.system.co.uk/sysmaps_cm.html - A site which can pick up signals from GPSGate (using CloudMade OSM Maps)
Providing a link from Garmin USB units (eg. Etrex) to:
- Traveling salesman
- GPSD which in turn in turn can be used by the JOSM/Plugins/LiveGPS plugin for JOSM to provide real time updates.
Alternatives
For port splitting see
- http://www.gpsmeter.com It's free and works very well according to [2]
- Xport Free, includes a feature to save stream of incoming GPS data.
For translating a USB Garmin to NMEA on a virtual serial port:
- Garmin Spanner (Wikipedia article) - free, though does not work with all USB Garmin devices