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Comment by asielen | Hacker News Reader

I love location data. In fact when I travel, I bring a GPS logger to track all my locations, it helps me sync up my ok photos and retrace my steps. I have pretty precise maps of ally big trips in the last 10 years.

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A GPS logger? What does that do over just your phone? I've been wanting an app to log my location outside of Google but was having trouble picking one to trust

My main concern for having a dedicated GPS logging device is the battery drain of the tracking apps on my phone. Used to have a Transystem 747ProS [1] which uses a Nokia BL-5C battery and would last a few days. However, that device was quite dated even then and its accuracy often lacking.

Now I am carrying a dedicated Android phone with me (a Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G) on which I have PhoneTrack [2] installed. The app starts tracking as soon as the phone is moving and saves all the data on device. I used to have an instance of Owntracks [3] running, but now I just run a simple Flask app which pipes the GPS points to a PostGIS database on my local network when I am home. To visualize the tracks, I import them into QGIS. As the phone is solely used for tracking and only when I take it with me, the battery lasts about three days.

[1] http://www.transystem.com.tw/www/product.php?b=G&m=pe&cid=4&... [2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.eneiluj.nextcloud.phonet... [3] https://owntracks.org

Very interesting! Thanks for this. I am worried about the same thing so might end up having to do this.

I'm not sure it's what you need but OSMAnd is open source and can record your movements. I use it to record some of my bicycle rides, then I share it to my laptop for a backup, or to whatever share target the app can find.

The plus version is on F-Droid for free. It has unlimited map downloads.

I imagine having that record your movements 24/7 would drain the battery like crazy, though.

If you look at Google Timeline, sometimes the track it records is not particularly accurate, likely because it's only getting updates for significant changes in your location.

I also use OwnTracks to keep track of myself, and there I can see the individual points it gets from the OS notifying it of location changes, and... it's honestly not that great sometimes.

I'm recording one position every 5 seconds when I want to get a GPX track of my ride. If I only wanted a record of my general position I guess I could take 1 position every 5 minutes. However I keep my GPS turned off and I never gave my location history to Google in all these years so I really don't know what the impact would be on battery.

The positions from OSMAnd seem pretty spot on.

I already use it for a Gmap alternative because some of its data is better.

I had no idea it did this. Thanks for the tip!

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