Live Tracking to the internet while flying

If you've hung around me much while flying the last number of years, I'm sure you've heard me ramble about my desire to put together some sort of live tracking device so people can watch our flights live over the internet...it'd be so cool to have a number of devices on pilots at a comp so the whole world can watch us.

It's been done before - with APRS. David Glover did an event with APRS about six years ago and it had pretty good success. The problem was is that it was complicated...you had to get an interface between your GPS and your radio that transmitted your coordinates over the 2m radio band over special, dedicated frequencies to a base station that collected the data, pumped it into a computer, did the processing and then pump it out to the internet. It wasn't cheap, easy or reliable. Extra, dedicated GPSs and phones were needed for each pilot, batteries for each, mount it somewhere and hope it works!

So the next option was to use cell transmission...we all fly with cell phones and don't use them in flight, unlike our GPS and radios so this seemed like a viable opportunity. There's the option of bluetooth connection to a bluetooth GPS or phones with a GPS built in. I even bought a Flytec 6030 and was one of the rare few that have one with the bluetooth module installed in North America - but none of us can get it paired with a cell phone to relay the info over SMS.

My Boost phoneOver the past couple of years, I've owned a Boost Mobile phone. It's cheap (free internet access) and had a GPS built into it and runs a Java operating system. It's been tough to get the application put on it (called Mologogo) but with the help of Davis Straub, we got that working last year. Mologogo is a free application with some neat social networking functions but it is also flexible and allows you to pump the GPS location data out over an alternate URL (altURL) so you can play with the data.

I enlisted the help of Gerry Grossnegger (Scare) and we tried a custom solution on the Canadian Team site last year as I drove across the country. We lad some good success for the first part of the trip....Gerry had basic tracking working (simply plotting points) but then we had troubles with the phone and the server side once we tried to do some animation and track log presentation. We got side-tracked again and abandoned the project.

I then solicited Manolis in Greece - he's the brains behind the Paragliding Forum and the Leonardo track server. I also owe him lots of thanks for helping with the Canadian implementation of Leonardo.

He's also programmed a Leonardo Live site that not many people know about. He's gone to the effort of programming an application for Nokia phones to do just what I've been trying to do in North America with Mologogo. Within 10 minutes, he changed his server to allow it to accept feeds from the Boost phone and got Leo Live working! I tested it out walking around last fall and it worked well - but with the cold Canadian winter, there was no flying for six months....

So I was excited heading to Arizona for the Santa Cruz Flats race to get this working....I got all my friends to get Boost phones in hopes of making this work. Manolis even has Live Tasks rigged so you can watch a race. I haven't seen that in action (in Europe) but apparently it works.

There was only one thing to keep this from working....and in fact has killed this project....cell coverage. I wasn't surprised but was disappointed. I tried it on the first three days of the event - the first day I had it velcroed to my crossbar and it only recorded about 20 minutes of my flight on Leo Live. And since we fly about an hour before the start goes off, this wasn't too exciting.

I thought the application/phone crashed and since I can't access it during flight, there was no way of knowing what happened. The next day I velcroed it to my downtube but I couldn't see the screen in flight as it was jammed in the corner and angled down. Once again I got about 20 minutes of recording. The third day I velcroed it to my base bar and was able to slide it over during flight where I could see it. Much to my dismay, it showed that it was out of service....no cell coverage. When that happened the app stops working as it is obviously useless without cell coverage.

The highest altitude recorded was about 1500m agl but we were often above that altitude. I suppose I could have fiddled with the phone and relaunched the application everytime I got low to see if it would have reconnected but when you are low while flying, messing with gear is the last thing on your mind.

I know the North American cell network is rather behind the times in comparison to Europe and coupled with this event being on the flats opposed to the European alps with cell towers on the peaks, I can see why it works over in Europe and not here. I may try it again in the Canadian Rockies sometime but that won't be til July at the earliest. I doubt I will mess with this more in the flats.

So where do we go from here? I am certain that the future will bring us easy-to-use, low cost live tracking. In fact, I already see the solution. The SPOT satellite tracker. It transmits your location via satellite so the cell coverage isn't an issue. It's low cost - $169 + yearly service fees. It's small and rugged. It will also act as a pseudo-PLB to call 9-1-1 in case of an emergency...complete with your coordinates.

The only part that isn't working now is the ability to transmit your location live to a website. They have some tracking services with the unit now but it's in it's first version now and requires you to log in to your own personal account to view the tracking....what's the point if you are the one flying/hiking/etc. You have to give your account login to others to view your track....dumb! A work around is in progress - SpotPlot is being worked on by Stewart Midwinter. It takes SMS messages sent by the SPOT and maps them.

Stewart has put a lot of work into this as he sees it's benefits for HG/PG and sail planes. Unfortunately, I am betting that SPOT will have a much better implementation of this in their v2 of their services but I've been trying to allow them to redirect your location feeds to an external site (much like Mologogo does now) but they haven't been receptive to the idea....I'm sure their holding their cards close to themselves.

There the long and short of my experimentation....it's been time-consuming and disappointing. I think I'm done with the cell system and will either wait for the satellite system to work or maybe look into the APRS thing again....I think pilots use their radios to talk during flight less-and-less these days. They used to be used to relay their position while flying cross-country but now with GPSs and cell phones, retrieval is simple....so maybe APRS is the way to go since you'd be able to use pilots' existing radios to transmit location....

Any suggestions?