Open Streetmapping with Motorola A780: Strange values

For some weeks now, I am a proud owner of a linux driven A780 GPS mobile. It is quite easy to open GPS tracks in any text editor: Mounting my Motorola as mass storage is done automagically by udev + hal daemons.

Parsing its contents is less easy – at least if you want to make use of all information stored.
Obviously, tracking is vector orientated: Each vector (logged as one line) has got one start and one end time, latitude, and longitude. In hardly any case, subsequent vectors have common end/start values.

It shouldn’t be very hard to write a parser extracting all given coordinates (i.e. start and end coords for any vector line) – but guessing the meaning of the left columns occurs to be hard:

StDate     StTime   EndDate    EndTime       StLat     EndLat      StLong     EndLong Fix Total     Total #OfObs
(UTC)      (UTC)    (UTC)      (UTC)                                                      Miles     Hours
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
08/23/2008 09:11:15 08/23/2008 09:15:50  52.029861  52.039635    8.555399    8.598636 1 -3649860701231198131961668199318255273253704759060934360615150772018946839312983390068665767128059356237740002978924188506914396338678317267284591053595745998525189226233856.00     0.000 768152
08/23/2008 09:15:53 08/23/2008 09:17:04  52.039892  52.037446    8.599602    8.614022 1 -78118279941557931703363451455652206793696749610332198789022918111496705774753948327901293097707913114779364083391770081968424685419280192230328808432059202942449336286932111339638257750450957502640494359747686692974231552.00     0.000 768152
08/23/2008 09:17:09 08/23/2008 09:17:28  52.037435  52.037543    8.613871    8.613807 1   -0.00     0.000 768152
08/23/2008 09:17:46 08/23/2008 09:18:12  52.037328  52.039549    8.614043    8.617584 1   -0.00     0.000 768152
08/23/2008 09:18:15 08/23/2008 09:19:43  52.040010  52.047724    8.618184    8.635565 1 -344646659481965599028466738922047546765953134524746744268617381020796015676674827437106811168638611102639620443121993900825615697463858624748128071954920622070466913444633264051453952.00     0.000 768152
08/23/2008 09:19:46 08/23/2008 09:25:32  52.048389  52.066178    8.635329    8.662022 1 -438278375512559217652056156777336964928373076093870088506703880101717226850843193135491371767624957503494869835647695687123337567729156216808571666432.00     0.000 768152
08/23/2008 09:25:36 08/23/2008 09:28:46  52.067304  52.101261    8.662473    8.718177 1 30068130744005489155484081831838965166576489273498100822888867340749494086281791865200369474663529612734774394515077434054123978752.00     0.000 768152

Take note of the huge values shown in the “Total Miles” field – if these are decimal numbers, they would be really big numbers; Openoffice.org Calc reads the last column like this:

-3,65E+171
-7,81E+220
0
0
-3,45E+182
-4,38E+149
3,01E+130

And what does the last field mean, cryptically named #OfObs ?

One comment on “Open Streetmapping with Motorola A780: Strange values”

  • I will report on BikeAtor later. This tool, running on my A780, will write propper GPX log files. You can also take pictures with GPX tags. If you use your AMR sound recorder, you can also do audio mapping.

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