How to use free GPS on a K750i mobile phone

Google high level map

Last year I bought a tiny bluetooth GPS device off ebay for £20. I set up my laptop with it and we managed to drive around Germany using a copy of Autoroute showing our planned route, current GPS coordinates and it even shouted helpful instructions such as "turn left in 400 meters"! We planned our route in the hotel the night before and as we are often looking for poorly road-signed ancient sites it is terribly handy to have the confidence of the computer pointing you down an empty track rather than guesswork.

Open Street Map

I did get the GPS recognized by my Sony Ericsson K750i (due to a previous hack it runs using the W800i firmware) and used some trial software to show coordinates but little else. I spent some time yesterday further researching and managed to get it working quite beautifully yesterday.

The simple free java application is called TrekBuddy and it has an associated wiki site. After connecting to the GPS via bluetooth, the application shows where you are on a scrolling map that you define and store locally on the memory stick. I have it working with an almost A to Z street level map of London (spanning West Hammersmith through to Catford). You can load other maps as you go along so a later improvement would be to install a higher level road map of the UK. In the case of my map of London it was only 2mb in size (I use a 4gb stick!) so it would be no issue to carry around several maps.

Google low level map

I had to spend some time tweaking the configuration, in particular the initial location of the maps had to be entered by hand to point to the memory stick ("file:///E:/other/mapdata/london") and it took a while to work out that I needed to tick the option to enable a large atlas in order to display anything. The only other hard part was preparing the map, luckily someone has worked all this out and I imported maps from Open Street Map (setting default datum as WGS 84) using the tool listed on the wiki. I also managed to import using the rather neat Google Maps to TrekBuddy tool on the same page. The latter being slightly more limited as to the overall size of map but with the benefits of a better quality street map (just right for a pedestrian map in Central London).