This is a screen shot from the output of my Sony GPS, a GPS-CS1. It’s from the September 26 ride from Fort Loramie (in the upper left) to Urbana, OH (lower right).

I usually attach the device to the outside of the single pannier I carry with me, or else put it inside on days when there might be rain. At the end of the ride I throw the pannier in the back of the car and forget to turn it off, with the result that our car ride back to the motel is shown, too.

What I’d like to be able to do is edit those tracks, so I can at least omit the car ride portion, and make a regular Google map or Google Earth map out of my rides. Yes, the software uses Google maps, but it doesn’t provide any means to get the map into “My Maps” on Google, where I could then do other things with the pushpin markers and add other lines.

The device produces a log file which is very accessible on the computer. It looks to be some standard kind of file, and could be edited with a text editor. So it shouldn’t be much trouble to lop off the car ride.

Today I finally got around for looking around for information on the file format, and hopefully for tools to do further manipulations. So far I found this web page titled “Sony GPS-CS1 Review – Personal Opinion.” It identifies the data as “NMEA sentences” and gives a link to further information. That’s progress — more than I knew before.

But I’m linking it here because it also has a good summary of why this kind of GPS might be good for bicycle touring. As far as I know, it doesn’t do anything that other GPSs won’t do, and it’s lacking some features one would like. As the author, who identifies himself as arb, says:

The Sony GPS-CS1 is a very simple GPS device – it records your position everywhere you go. It has no screen display, no controls, and you can’t get it to tell you where you are right now. So why pay so much for such a seemingly less-than-useful device?

Arb then lists the reasons why — all reasons I agree with.

I think if I ever got a GPS device that -did- have a screen to tell me where I am, I’d still carry this one and use it for tagging my photos.

Usually when I’m in checkerboard country that has been surveyed into square mile sections, it isn’t hard for me to know where I am. On this particular ride, I did have some moments along the Great Miami River, where the usual section cues were missing, when I could have benefited from knowing more precisely where I was. And there are places like the Virginia Military Tract (shown in the above map to the upper right of a red line that I added to the screen shot) that are not surveyed into square mile sections. I could see where a GPS readout could be handy in that country, though on my rides up there this year the road intersections provided enough reference points for me to know where I was.

Now to go and follow up on some of those leads I found on arb’s web page.