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July 02, 2006
Live Tracking of Tour de France in Google Earth
[NOTE: the live tracking link in this article was for 2006 ONLY. Here is a link to the 2007 Tour de France route in Google Earth.]
The Tour de France coverage in Google Earth gets even better. The author of the Tour de France Google Earth file, showing the routes of the stages of this year's race, has now added an ability to provide live tracking of race progress. Download the TdF network link 
, then open the "Tour de France 2006" places folder and turn on "Live TDF". You will see a red bike showing the current progress of the race, and it indicates the distance travelled and local time stamp. Read more about the TdF 2006 network link in the earlier GEB story. Here's the post by the author announcing the new tracking.
Here's what the author says about yesterday's stage and the new network link:
Saturday the prologue is taking place in Strasbourg. Today we start the first stage over 185 km, mostly flat. The network link has been updated to include the live tracking red bicycle. You should see the red bike sitting near the 5 km mark on the track. It is showing a timestamp at 1:47:30, which is the time of the last test...
[NOTE: turn off the "Live TDF" link when you are done viewing, or it will keep changing your view every 20 seconds. Save your "Tour de France 2006" network link by dragging it to your "My Places folder".]
Posted by FrankTaylor at July 2, 2006 08:04 AM
Comments
Posted by: Franck SPINELLI at July 2, 2006 09:20 AM
Now that's cool!
Been tracking it for a while now accross some high res areas of Franch.
Very Impressive
Posted by: Jimmy Lemon at July 2, 2006 10:36 AM
There is also an live and interactive Google Maps app online: http://www.ubilabs.net/tdf
Posted by: aemkei at July 2, 2006 10:45 AM
The Placemark with live coverage beeing my work, I am proud to anounce:
Look at www.letour.fr. They have published a coverage of the TdF for GE on their site.
I was contacted by Google last week where they asked permission to use my work as a basis for the official coverage by the Tdf organisation comitee.
Wow, thats cool, beeing asked by the big ones.
So all of you working hard to publish realy good GE placemarks. WE have it in hands to make the world more GE aware!
We can expect to see some more details on start and arrival locations in the www.Letour.fr version.
Posted by: lucifer666 at July 3, 2006 03:36 AM
This is fantastic!
I'd like the Tour de France and I follow it on the Dutch TV. This live tracking is perfect!
Posted by: funny at July 3, 2006 06:09 AM
I'll be doing the Tour de France with a former U.S. Postal Rider, named Marty Jemison. He has a tour group that follows the TdF. I hope to be blogging about my experience, and I'd like to also put Google Earth on my blog to give readers a live showing of the race. How can I do that?
Posted by: Bambi at July 6, 2006 03:40 PM
Bottom line is to get your real time position. That could be done in several ways. The main issue is to have enough power supply all along the way and full gprs coverage too.
Contact me if you want some more info.
And congrats to do this amazing loop on a bicycle. I prefer doing it in front of routefocus ;)
Posted by: Franck at July 15, 2006 11:51 AM
I'll be doing the Tour de France with a former U.S. Postal Rider, named Marty Jemison.
Posted by: poop at September 13, 2007 05:46 PM
I'll be doing the Tour de France with a former U.S. Postal Rider, named Marty Jemison.
Posted by: poop at September 13, 2007 05:46 PM
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Hi everybody,
Thanks to licfer666 for his job.
We developped with some friends a real time tracking live Tour de France system.
We equipped 2 cars from BOUYGUES TELECOM Team with a GPS/GPRS blackbox. These boxes send each 15 seconds real time locations with speed. Enjoy yourself downloading our freeware on http://www.routefocus.com