"The world in your Palm" by Steve Litchfield
  PalmUser issue 4 July 2000

Steve Litchfield explores hardware and software to put you on the map.

If you live in the USA then you’re extremely fortunate as far as navigation software goes: detailed mapping, right down to street level, is freely available at almost every turn, including on computers of all shapes and sizes. Those living in (or visiting) other countries have less to look forward to. Either good electronic mapping does exist but the data costs so much that little of it has filtered down into computer software, or the data itself is of poor quality.

GPS (Global Positioning System) receivers continue to tumble in price and increase in accuracy, especially now that the American military have turned off their ‘scrambling’ circuits (see page 10), and have the advantage that they work anywhere in the world. Some of the expensive models even have built-in rudimentary outline and road maps of much of the world. As a Palm owner you may be looking to enhance the positional information from a GPS with some additional data stored on your organizer.

Do-It-Yourself maps

It’s because of the relatively poor coverage of the most countries by existing Palm software that we'll look first at ways to ‘go it alone’. As a bare minimum you’ll need a paper map of the area concerned (however good or bad) and access to a desktop scanner. The most obvious way of getting a map into your Palm is as a scanned image, although it pays to think first about which software you’re going to be using to display the image and in how many ‘colors’. Each image is limited to 64k in size under the Palm OS and although the popular ‘Image Viewer’ (now ‘Fire Viewer’) format supports compression, this simply reduces each image’s memory requirements - you can’t actually make the original images any bigger.

In practice this works out to image sizes of approximately 700 by 700 pixels (for black and white), 500 by 500 (black, white and 2 shades of gray), 350 by 350 (16 level grayscale) or a paltry 240 by 240 in 8-bit color. See our article ‘Picture that’ in issue 3 for more information on grayscales and color, and on converting images from the desktop.

The smaller the pixel dimensions of your map image, the less detail you'll be able to show and the smaller the coverage area, so it pays to think hard before you commence scanning. Using color is all very well, but with such a small image size available you’ll be very restricted in what you can show. For most purposes, dithering a map down to 4 or fewer shades of gray is a good compromise and allows you to show a reasonable map area. Once scanned and converted into FireViewer format for the Palm, there are a number of options for displaying and scrolling around. Again see ‘Picture that’ for discussion of the possibilities. If scanning in your own paper maps, remember to observe any applicable copyright restrictions!

Map management

Of course, a low-tech way of increasing the coverage area is simply to have several images (i.e. map ‘tiles’), each within the 64k limit. Switching between images quickly gets tiresome though and something more automated is required. Which is where Atlas, by GPSPilot.com, comes in. First of all, there’s its desktop component, Cartographer, which seamlessly constructs image tiles (black and white or color) from a much larger scanned image - all you have to supply is an accurate latitude and longitude for the top-left and bottom-right corners. The tiles are each stored as individual records in the resulting map database, with their own latitude and longitude corner details. Back on the Palm, Atlas then intelligently stitches them all together as you scroll around. I like the fact that the exact calibration of an individual map can be done on the organizer itself if you discover errors in your desktop work.

Just as impressive is support for zooming in and out. Having subsequently found paper maps of greater and lesser detail than my original, I then scanned the relevant sections and converted them in Cartographer to new map databases. Zooming in (with the Up scroll button) then switches to each database in turn, showing the appropriate map for the coordinates of the current map center.

Landmarks such as airports, monuments, towers or perhaps just your home, can all be entered as special ‘Points’, together with exact coordinate information and some short notes. These then show on the map with appropriate icons, and tapping on them displays all available information. Atlas’s interface has more than a few rough edges, but once you find your way around the various screens and have calibrated your maps it’s largely ‘set and forget’.

Global Positioning System

Now that we’ve established a fair amount of positional information, it’s appropriate to introduce a GPS element. At its simplest, most GPS receivers will send plain text latitude and longitude information at 4800 bits per second to any connected computer, using a standard number format known as NMEA 0183. Almost any GPS unit can be used with a Palm organizer, the main differences being in the simplicity (or otherwise) of connection.

If you already own a handheld GPS (such as a Garmin or Magellan unit), or decide to buy one so that you can sometimes use it independently of your Palm, you’ll need to connect the two together. You could use a Palm travel kit Hotsync cable, null-modem adapter (available from your local computer stockiest) and standard GPS desktop serial cable, but the resulting loops of wire make it a very ungainly solution. Better by far is a short dedicated connecting cable, with a Palm serial connector at one end and the correct plug for your GPS at the other. Blue Hills Innovations made mine, for a Palm IIIx to an ancient Garmin 45, but they offer cables for Palm V range as well, and to all Garmin models up to the present day.

You’ll see the Garmin name mentioned often when people talk about GPS and for good reason. While I’m sure other manufacturers produce good and working units, their data compatibility is sometimes called into question, with a variety of NMEA 0183 sub formats and some that work in an entirely different way altogether. It goes without saying that you should contact the vendors to check compatibility between the software you’re using and the GPS you’re going to buy.

Reviewing StreetFinder

Simpler still but more expensive is a dedicated Palm GPS. Leaving aside interesting add-ons for the future (GPS cards to fit the TRGPro, GPS Springboards for the Visor, etc.), there’s a solution available today in the Rand McNally StreetFinder GPS units, which piggy-back onto the organizers themselves. I’ve been testing the Palm III version, though there’s a slightly smaller Palm V counterpart available.

The Palm IIIx (minus flip cover, which fouls on the antenna section) clips into place within the frame of the GPS’s plastic body and sits neatly on the built-in serial connector. The StreetFinder itself has grooves on its back for the supplied car mounting stand, essential unless you happen to have an interested passenger. Plugging the supplied DC power lead into a 12V cigarette lighter socket completes a very fast and simple installation. Acquisition time appears to be negligible, with GPS signals available to the Palm almost immediately - I had no problems getting fixes from 7 or more satellites even through the car’s windscreen and sun-roof. Although the software supplied was just for the USA, the StreetFinder unit worked well with Atlas, the latter showing my exact location on-screen, auto-scrolling the map to match and echoing both heading and speed at the top of the main display.

A small disappointment with the unit is that there’s no battery option (presumably due to the GPS’s power requirements) but I would have thought there was room in the spine for a rechargeable pack. A bigger niggle is that there’s no LED either on the GPS or on the 12V plug - given the notorious unreliability of in-car sockets, it would have been very helpful to know for sure that the GPS was ‘on’.

See also

Palmtop Software’s Route Europe (reviewed in issue 1) was the other major GPS-enabled program I was able to try here in the UK. Although the level of map detail is quite low, showing just towns and roads of reasonable size, the GPS link-up worked well from the start, showing position on the fully-zoomable vector map as a black circle. The lack of finer detail is made up for by the unique ability to perform genuine route finding between towns and cities, with the latest v2.0 coping with more than one country loaded at the same time.

With the recent massive improvement in GPS accuracy, I expect to see an explosion in both hardware and software solutions, at ever-tumbling prices. Already developers are talking about inserting GPS expansion cards into Palm OS organizers, and the Symbian consortium’s rival Quartz design (which should be commercially available within nine months or so) is allegedly GPS capabilities from day one. The biggest hurdle for most world citizens is access to accurate electronic mapping down to street level, but with vastly more people now expressing the need then surely even this will eventually arrive.

References

FireViewer - www.firepad.com

Atlas / Cartographer - www.gpspilot.com

Blue Hills Innovations (Garmin/Palm cables) - www.blue-hills-innovations.com

StreetFinder GPS - www.randmcnally.com

Route Europe/USA- www.palmtopsoftware.com

Palm/GPS information - users.cwnet.com/dalede/palm.htm

Boxout: “Born in the USA”

As mentioned elsewhere in this article, cheap and easy access to good electronic map information in the USA has led to a proliferation of good mapping and navigation software. In addition to the application mentionned in the article, the following US-specific resources are available:

HandMap and HandMap Pro, by Evolutionary Systems (www.handmap.net), is a vector-based Geographical Information System, with a huge range of features, including display of such categories as Restaurants, Entertainment, etc. and GPS support. US maps and routes can be downloaded from their web site, plus MapMaker, a Windows tool to convert ArcView map data into the HandMap format. Another Windows utility, MapIt, is of more general use, allowing the digitizing of a scanned bitmap and annotation with vector information.

JungleMap, by JungleSoft (www.junglesoft.com), offers just major city areas in similar vector form, but does include house number extrapolation along each road and a link to your Address Book.

Quo Vadis, by MarcoSoft (www.marcosoft.com), also uses basic vector-drawn maps of the US, downloaded from their web site. GPS input is supported, along with a tracking function to always point towards your destination.

StreetSigns, by TrekWare (www.trekware.com), also includes basic house numbering along each road and works with Address Book. Signpost waypoints can be added and annotated.

StreetFinder by Rand McNally (www.randmcnally.com), is the companion software to the GPS units mentioned above. Vector-based, but with good use of greyscale and filled areas, you can not only install maps from the supplied CD, but Point Of Interest data and calculated routes as well.

Solus Pro, by Delorme (www.delorme.com), has data in vector form on the desktop, being rasterised into bitmap form for use on the Palm. Fully supports GPS and includes functions for route and waypoint following.

PlaceTrace, by Optimal Vector (www.optimalvector.com), again uses vector maps, loaded in from PC and with GPS support. It will log your progress even if you stray outside the loaded map boundaries, enabling you to overlay the right map when back at base.
 

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