Oxfamulators support page

Team and Thank you


Cameron Braid - Fixed the web page and made it really great.
Dick Carter - car fridge
Waratah - GPS tracker unit
Joel & Vivian - Phone batteries for GPS unit
Waree - Phone battery for GPS unit.

Mel - Not just food but great food and just taking care of everything to be eaten
Paul - Easy Up, gas heater, Helping to setup and pull down the tents.
Darren - Supply and erect the tent at Lake manchester.
Frank - I had fun supplying 240v to run the foot spa's at Lake manchester, Organising the GPS and looking after the kids.
Sean - Loan of his car and the Gold Creek stop.

Bob and Ivan for navigation and providing experience and help especially in training and getting the girls ready.

Cybele - Chief Whip cracker and enthusiast
Claire
Erin
Megan

GPS
Wondered how the GPS worked?
In Megan's back pack was a TK102 GPS tracker (Look on ebay.  about $85)
The TK102 has a GPS receiver and a GSM phone module.
I fitted a Telstra Next G sim (because I had it) in the hope that Telstra's coverage would be the most complete.  It would have been nice to have a Next-G tracking device however we had what we had.
The sim was on a shared data plan from Telstra.  No longer available.  The current plan is $5 per month for 5MB data.

The TK102 is programmed using text messages.  I set it to transmit once every 5 minutes.  Basically to try to conserve battery life as I really did not want Megan to have to change batteries.  I used BL-5C batteries in place of the BL-5B batteries that it is designed to use.  The BL5C is held in place with electrical tape because it is longer than the unit is designed for.

The TK102 was programmed to transmit data TCPIP packets to gpsgate.com,  Buddy tracker service.  This is a free service and you can log in to see the location and history of your unit.  I wanted to use gpsgate to actually display the position on a public web page but i could not find out how to do that.  They did however provide example code for hosting it on my own server.

Within gpsgate.com, I created a "public group" and this provided the conduit to access the data.

Then I used the example code to set up a web page on
syndetic.com.au/ftest1.html

This web page is loaded into your browser.  It then goes off to google and gets the map data and displays it.
It goes to gpsgate and retrieves the current position and all the historical data and then creates google poly lines which is the green line on the map.
And there you have it.

A really big thank you to two key people.  Firstly to Waratah who loaned me the TK102 and showed me gpsgate.com and to Cameron Braid who took my web page and really spruced it up.