Kevin Zeits sent in his diy Nikon d200 gps cable and hot shoe gps mount.
Nikon sells it for $150, but has a 3 to 6 month eta. Ok, it’s really just a ttl to rs-232 converter with proprietary connectors – but I love tagging photos with gps info. Now if only I could do this for my canon rebel xt. (It would take a firmware hack at the minimum) If you’re not blessed with a d200, check out gpsphotolinker.

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A Radiosonde is an inexpensive sensor package that’s intended to be used with a weather balloon for atmospheric measurements. The device transmits data in the 403 MHz band after being launched and they usually aren’t recovered after use. You can pick them up for very little money on eBay so [Nick] thought they might work well as a low cost GPS tracker. Unfortunately the Radiosonde doesn’t transmit standard NMEA GPS data, but GPS doppler measurements. It’s hard to determine what those are actually useful for. Nick did find one other paper documenting an unsuccessful attempt which he has posted to his site. So now Nick is looking for some help either making the data more useful or coming up with a functional device that’s just as inexpensive. Anyone got any leads?

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This Russian site has all the details needed to upload new maps to a Magellan eXplorist 300, 200, or 100. Inside the battery case are four pads that can be used for serial communication. You will have to use a MAX232 to shift the voltage levels. Since this occupies the battery space you’ll need to provide power as well. This can be tapped from a USB port. Once the cable is built you can download waypoints using OziExplorer.

[thanks Chris, Cary for corretion]

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Automatic Position Reporting System (APRS) is used to transmit location and other real-time data over amateur radio frequencies. [Scott Miller]’s OpenTracker project is designed to encode the NMEA data from a serial GPS receiver for transmission. It doesn’t have to be used for GPS telemetry though, you could hook up a weather station or any other remotely located project. Scott has boards, parts and even full kits available.

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[Barry Carter] had a Pretec compact flash GPS adapter for his PDA and really liked how it worked. The problem was it took up the CF slot so he wasn’t able to add any flash memory to the device to store larger maps. He opened up the device and discovered that it only had five wires attached to the compact flash portion. The lines came from an NMEA chip and he used a scope to figure out the port settings. All that was needed was an RS232 converter. With the new packaging he was able to plug the GPS portion into the PDA’s serial port and use a larger CF card for storage.

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