Engineering:GPS Tuner

GPS Tuner is the name of a software company based in Budapest, Hungary, and of a software product they make. The software is a tool intended for off-road navigation based on the Global Positioning System (GPS), where it is used to determine position while cycling, hiking, geocaching, boating, flying, driving, and many other outdoor sporting activities. It can be used by those with a GPS receiver alone, or in a smartphone, Pocket PC, or iPhone. Recently, the firm released a new version of its navigation software dedicated to electric bicycles named eBike Navigation. This new version includes a variety of battery management features like display for battery capacity, range, gear, power and battery consumption. EBike Navigation also offers assistance recommendations for optimizing battery capacity along with a real rage calculation based on terrain elevation and other variable conditions. In mid-2010, the firm released an iPhone app version of the software that included technology allowing off-road turn-by-turn navigation.

Functionality

Length units and map grids are selectable. Units include metric, imperial or nautical. Grids include 24 national grids, such as WGS-84, British (OSGB36), NAD27, NAD83.

Mapping supports JPG files as maps, calibration desktop software program, auto map loading feature, zoom and pan by pen or joystick, flexible layer and track/route display, distance measuring and route defining manually by drawing on maps. The map can also be blank.

For navigation, the digital compass has a real time rotating compass with a target arrow. The target arrow points to a defined target coordinate. Any waypoint, trackpoint, or point of map can be selected as target, with six different types of compass views, 38 selectable compass tools, voice navigation and next turn indication for routes. The trip computer monitors whole trips, with options to save, load and reset. It has 31 selectable trip computer tools, a graph for altitude and speed, selectable tool window size, and can push track data into trip computer to get a full track analysis.

Waypoints, point of interest (POI) support GPS eXchange Format (GPX), LOC, Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files. Track, route supports GPX, TRK, KML files, and tracking recording by configurable auto, time, or distance interval. Waypoints and tracks can be viewed in Google Earth directly, with KML export/import. Flexible waypoint management, convert track to route and reverse route direction.

It can do NMEA recording, playback (with selectable speed), and can jump to any position in NMEA files, skipping unneeded data.

Position sharing allows user positions to be shared in real time with other users, which position is also displayed. All user positions can be monitored in a web browser, suitable for precise personal and vehicle tracking.

Vector and raster graphics

GPS navigation applications use vector-based maps called vector graphics. This map type contains objects such as points of interest, city names, and street names, which are stored in data tables inside the map itself. GPS Tuner uses such vector map data, combined with raster graphics based maps.

Custom user maps can be created and calibrated by users, or pre-calibrated maps can be downloaded from many free websites. As pictures, the maps need no updating until any elements of the picture map change, such as street positions, new roads are added, etc. POIs are not built into the pictures, and are instead maintained in a separate vector file database.

See also

• Geocaching
• GPS
• GPS tracking
• GPS navigation software
• GPS coordinates