Many people have found ways to tie their GPS with Google Earth to show their position in real-time. In fact, Google released built-in features for real-time GPS to the premium Plus/Pro/Enterprise versions of Google Earth starting with a beta version of GE 4 in December 2006. However, Google’s real-time GPS support has never been particularly fancy. The best real-time interface I’ve seen so far has been from Goops Technologies. I really like Goops because they support features supporting all types of travel including planes and boats. However, I wish they had a Mac version too. Thanks to Google Earth working even without an Internet connection, you can have a powerful 3D mapping applications wherever you go.
Recently, Valery Hronusov (who has built many useful Google Earth files and applications) has released a new free real-time GPS tracking application he is calling Navigator. It also only works on Windows, but it has some nice looking features. I tried it with my Garmin 60Cx and it works quite well. It automatically logs your track to a KML file and you can control your zoom level while it tracks. His support for USB interface works very nicely, and they claim it will work with multiple GPSes. He is just getting started, so it doesn’t have the polish of Goops. But, Valery has a reputation of implementing lots of innovative features, so maybe Navigator will add some new stuff in the coming weeks or months.
So, if you want real-time GPS tracking with Google Earth. You have yet another method – without resorting to buying the premium versions of Google Earth. At least for personal use. If you need to use Google Earth for commercial applications, you should still buy a Google Earth Pro license.
Network Links
Google News Layer for Google Earth Next Week
I will be writing some more summaries from Where 2.0 2008 tomorrow. But, I just wanted to share one bit of Google Earth news from today’s sessions. Lior Ron, Product Manager of Google Maps, made several Google Maps announcements in his talk today (more details tomorrow). One thing he announced, is a plan to release a Google News layer for both Google Earth and Google Maps (in the new “More…” layer option for Google Maps). Google News aggregates news from thousands of news sources all over the world.
Google joined up with the New York Times and released just over a month ago the first built-in live updating layer of news from the NY Times in Google Earth. Now they have apparently determined some ways to get geospatial information for a wide range of news sources and will release this new layer – according to Lior Ron – in about a week. It will be interesting to see how they highlight each news agency’s content and attribution in this new layer. I assume you’ll have to link back to their web page to read the full stories.
More Where 2.0 news tomorrow. You can read more Where 2.0 news for Google Earth: Day 1 summary, Google John Hanke Keynote, and Day 2 summary.
Where 2.0 – Day 1
Left my house near Raleigh, NC at 4 AM to fly out to California. I was a bit weary after nearly 11 hours of travel when I arrived at the Where 2.0 registration desk. But, I did manage to show up just in time for lunch! Brady Forrest of O’Reilley, Program Chair for Where 2.0, joined me for lunch and brought me up to date on events thus far. He said the morning tutorials were well attended and seemed to be quite popular (see schedule for Monday). Also, nearly half the people who registered for the conference were in attendance for the first day events. Also, overall attendance looked to be higher than last year. Several announcements are lined up for the week as well from both big and new players in the geospatial community. Looks like lots of good stuff for this year’s event!
The afternoon tutorials included another four tutorials. Naturally, I chose to attend the one by Google entitled: “Searching the Geoweb: Exposing Your Geo Data to Search Engines” by Lior Ron and Mano Marks. Their session focused on how to get your geospatial data to be recognized by search engines (or at least Google). Google has already been scanning web sites for links to GeoRSS, KML, or KMZ files as well as the Google Earth Community and other known locations. They gave tips on how to improve the chances things will be indexed. A significant point is that you shouldn’t make a single large file with tens of thousands of placemarks. Better to break down the content into different files. The one piece of real news in this session is that Google is now supporting a new sitemap file format for geospatial content. This means you can very specifically tell the search engines to look for a KML, KMZ, or GeoRSS file which will then be almost immediately scanned into the geosearch index. The last half of the session was dedicated to discussing how to create good KML content using various tools as well as directly coding KML. Google said there will be more of these tutorials during the Google I/O developer conference later this month.
Keep reading for some details on Ignite/Launchpad.
NASA Time Animation of Ionosphere For Google Earth
Last week, NASA announced the release of an amazing dynamic Google Earth resource which shows time animated condition of the Earth’s Ionosphere. The ionosphere is used to bounce radio signals over the horizon for long distance communication. But, when storms occur on the sun’s surface they can mess up parts of the ionosphere and disrupt ionosphere-based communications. The new NASA Google Earth data can be used to quickly understand where and when there may be radio communication issues.
See for example 
their primary network link which shows the current condition of the ionosphere in the form of total electron content. Then, check out an animation of the total electron content for the past 24 hours . You use the time slider to see the animation, but note that it will take a while to load each image overlay which covers the entire Earth. Red means area of strong atmospheric disturbance where communications problems are likely to occur. Blue/dark means communications will be fine. You will notice that the night side of the Earth is the best time for radio communications.
This NASA information not only makes for cool looking Google Earth visualizations, but is very useful to anyone with a profession or need for using short-wave radio (e.g. HAM radio operators, mariners, coast guards, etc.). Airliners are increasingly flying over the arctic regions to take shorter routes, but in this area they can’t use satellite communications based on geosynchronous satellites. So, they resort to short wave radio over the poles. If the ionosphere is important to you, check out the full list of GE ionosphere visualizations from NASA here. NASA also has a communications alert and prediction system which uses this data.
NASA has done many other Google Earth visualizations. Here are just a few:
Space Debris Viewed in Google Earth
In January 2007, the Chinese military decided to demonstrate their technological prowess by shooting down one of their own satellites in orbit. The action was condemned by governments around the world, but many people may not have realized the real consequence. The Earth’s orbit is getting very cluttered with satellites and debris after 50 years of launches from Earth. But, this one decision to explode a satellite in space contributed thousands of potentially deadly projectiles (golf ball sized or larger) into many orbits around the Earth. Each object in orbit is typically flying around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour (27,400 km/h). The European Space Agency recently shared a press release describing the problem of space debris including some 3D visualizations).
Robert Simpson, who writes the Orbiting Frog blog, had already developed a tool for visualizing orbit tracks in Google Earth. He recently gave a talk on space debris at Cardiff University. Using the orbit tracker, and the data available on all objects tracked in space at Celestrack, he was able to create this visualization showing the positions of all the tracked objects from the destroyed Chinese satellite in Google Earth. Each placemark is a Chinese flag showing the position of tracked debris from that one explosion. This is a network link which will automatically update every 5 minutes with the current position of each object. Read Robert’s post for more details and you can get a copy of his presentation.