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Written by Chris Tangora
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Tuesday, 17 April 2007 |
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Page 1 of 2 Global position your Mac
 The GlobalSat BT-359 Bluetooth GPS device from US Global Satellites offers Mac (and PC) users the ability to add GPS functionality to their Bluetooth enabled Mac. GPS (Global Position Satellites) devices receive their signals from satellites and can track your position nearly anyplace on the earth. The location is figured by triangulating your location from multiple satellites. Military grade GPS devices receive the higher grade "pings" from the satellites, while the commercial grade receives a lower grade "ping". By referencing the delay between the different pings of each satellite, the GPS devices can triangulate where in the world you are. Minor interference can add up and cause the civilian GPS device to be up to 15 meters off, but BT-359 units sold in North America use WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System) to accommodate for the difference.
GlobalSat's BT-359 is a bluetooth GPS unit for your Mac. It uses the same signals and technology that the hand-held devices use, but it brings many advantages with it. The BT-359's footprint is very small, with a plastic ring on the back to help keep it in place on flat or near-flat surfaces. It also doesn't require any wires to operate. The device can be up to 30 feet away and still be in communication with the host computer.
The overall performance of the device was good. The picture to the left shows a time lapse of a 24 hour period, every 5 seconds a reading was recorded and marked on the Google Map with the gps2gex application. Overall I would feel safe with these readings, while there were some variances, nothing dramatic. In future long-term test I discover some abnormalities, but I will cover those later in the article. For the most part, I would say the device received or displayed inaccurate data about 0.2% of the time, giving it a 99.8% accuracy rate. That is good enough for any application that I can really think of.
The device is charged by a standard mini-USB cable, but does not communicate via the USB connection. Included with the unit is two USB power adapters, one for the AC current in your home outlets and one for the DC current in your cars cigarette lighter. The device holds a charge for about 10 hours, and will automatically shut down after 10 minutes of not syncing with a host computer. It is nice to see that US Global Satellites went with a rechargeable solution rather than a device that keeps on needing new batteries. It takes a little less than 5 hours to gain a full charge to the system, and the device is usable while you are charging it, you can even leave the unit plugged in and operate it 24/7.
The device is small enough to have multiple uses in consumer electronics. A few uses would be in automobile trips, similar to a "tom tom" or other GPS device. This device could easily be setup to work in a "Mac Car" to add GPS utilities to the carputer [Editor's note: a Modcast will soon be completed featuring a mac carputer]. It is also usable in the aerospace and nautical applications. Because it can be recharged via an AC or DC charger, it can be used in many situations. One of the more interesting uses that this device is perfect for is photographers in the field. Since a laptop is now a requirement for photographers, you can now have the GPS coordinates of where you took your pictures added to the EXIF data in your pictures. While this isn't always a must for shooting pictures of little Joey and Susie, it would be nice for photographers taking wildlife pictures or in any remote area. There are multiple commercial, shareware, and freeware applications that use GPS input, one of these apps will be covered by Tom in his dot.app columns.
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