[pct-l] Blackberry GPS

[Peter Shaw]

Last year I tried to do exactly what Gadget suggests - get GPS coordinates
out of the Blackberry Bold and use those to geolocate on Halfmile's maps.
Unfortunately, after scouring the Blackberry App World I couldn't find
anything that would display UTM coordinates. If you use the refresh gps
setting on the Blackberry, it generates lat/long in deg / min.min
coordinates. I did find GPS Tracker which is a free app that is used to
provide a real time track of your phone on a web site - presumably to track
your kids whereabouts. GPS Tracker produces lat/long in deg.deg units. So I
bought Topo for the three western states and generated my own maps with
deg.deg as the coordinate system, not UTM. I was also able to make the trail
line much clearer for my aging eyes to see. It was a lot of work - printing
Halfmile's maps would have been a lot easier and a lot cheaper. I think the
Blackberry apps have expanded significantly over the last year so maybe now
there is a navigation tool that can produce UTM coordinates. I met a guy on
trail with an iPhone and he had a navigation app that displayed all the
various coordinate formats. 

I also played with Topoexplorer but was so unimpressed with the daft world
map they provide and the lack of examples of how the software would be of
any use on the trail I threw it out.

Peanut Eater