Hi, my name is s1n and I am obsessed with GPS devices. In the back of my mind, something tells me I shouldn’t, but it’s so damn alluring to know where I am, where I am going, how fast I’m getting there, and what else is there where I am headed.

For the record, I own 3 GPS devices. That may not seem like an addiction, but how many GPS devices does one person really need?? I have 2 GPS watches, a Garmin 205 and a Timex BodyLink. My car also has a built-in GPS navigation unit, which I presume is also a Garmin. I have actually stopped using the Timex watch in favor of the shiny new Garmin.

So far, the 205 is a vastly superior GPS watch over the Timex BodyLink. It keeps a better connection, there’s no annoying GPS pod, the interface is simple (4 boxes of fully configurable data), and the watch is generally a more powerful tool. I can race myself with it, setup time or distance intervals, I can have it keep the backlight on for longer (or always on). Lastly, you can also connect the 205 to your computer and download the data without needing another data recording pod. That last bonus is a huge deal breaker for me. I want to be able to use my watch and my NAS as my training log.

I have become obsessed with collecting the data from the unit. I can hook the device up to my computer using a program called gpsbabel. In my testing though, I’ve found the results of GPSBabel to be less accurate than the Windows application SportTracks. For now, I am importing the tracks via SportTracks and exporting the data to the network. At some point in the future, I would like to rely solely on gpsbabel and pyTrainer (I have some scripts that allow me to use my media keyboard to simply matters). I have become involved in the pyTrainer project lately and it seems like the role I will best serve as is the English documenter and the HIG compliance specialist.

Note, for those who want to hook their Garmin up to a Linux box, I would recommend using the track filter option if you have multiple tracks on your device.

I have found that for some reason, the GPX format has become a standard XML format for GPS data even though it has serious deficiencies. It cannot represent anything outside of bland coordinates and timestamps. There’s nothing in the spec that should prevent extensions from being adopted that add things such as heart rate readings, wind, lap data, calories, etc. Fortunately, Garmin has started an extensive developer site that should spur development of better future tools.

I must resist the urge to desire the brand new Garmin 405.