OT: GPS SD Cardfor the Treo 650

[JMckie]

http://www.brighthand.com/article/GPS_SD_Card_Available_for_Treo_650

Announced Jan 12
Cost: $250
Only works with Mapopolis and their own iGolf software
SDK available
I wonder how good reception can possibly be on an antenna that small.

Comments?

[JMckie]

And here's another SD receiver for Palm and PPC

http://gps.engadget.com/entry/1234000317026227

[jonasolof]

So you looked at that articel too and not only the boot babes. Sometimes small is beatiful, sometimes it's the other way around, the rounder the better...

In these two receivers, one has a patch and one has a small quadrifilar helical antenna, which could be a www.sarantel.com geohelix antenna. Those are made for portable device and with the intent of being little sensitive to how they are oriented and also not to be too sensitive to near field effects, a hand or antoher object. It's small because it uses ceramics as a dielectric instead of air. That way one can still maintain the needed ratio to wavelength in free space.


The patch antenna is the same. A gilsson patch antenna is only 25x25 mm, and they could probably be made smaller. But I believe the patch will be more sensitive to orientation while it might have better over all gain than the small quad helical. The rest depends on the quality of the electronics and the interference level of the PDÅ.

The real interest in these devices will come when they get support from the cellular net with assisted GPS (A-GPS) which has
been discussed here.

The Stellus at least has a general format out - NMEA

[JMckie]

I noticed there was more to the article.

A ton of new (well, seven, to be exact) SDIO expansion cards for handhelds and smartphones from Pretec: an SD 802.11b WiFi card, an SD Bluetooth card, an SD GPS module, an SD 56k modem, two SD digital camera attachments (one that’s VGA quality, the other with a resolution of 1.3 megapixels), and an SD barcode scanner.

Now I'm starting to wish I had SDIO.

[Roofrat]

JMckie, did you notice that the article you were quoting from was dated April 2004? A further link indicates that the 7 Pretek SDIO cards were to have been available the 2nd quarter of last year. I'm wondering why haven't we seen them yet?

[maxb]

JMckie

I hope i am not being silly but would it be possible to use an external antenna like GPS receiver (Gilsson? Garmin?) that can communicate with TREO 650 via bluetooth so that you can use the SD slot to for the maps on your SD card?

Thanks in advance.

[JMckie]

Originally posted by maxb
I hope i am not being silly but would it be possible to use an external antenna like GPS receiver (Gilsson? Garmin?) that can communicate with TREO 650 via bluetooth so that you can use the SD slot to for the maps on your SD card?


Actually it should be possible to use a BT receiver.

Note that I was merely pointing out that the iGolf SD card was announced. I wasn't recommending it - in fact it sounds like a bad idea.