The Guernsey Biological Records Centre has a MIO 168 Pocket PC with inbuilt GPS. We are using this to gather field records of plants and animals and also to mark out the boundaries of habitats etc. Back in the office we can load the data straight into our database. This is usually much quicker and more accurate than recording in the field with a notebook or voice recorder and subsequently entering the data manually. We have developed two programs. Both export the data as a text file.
The program for recording point data exports the following data in response to a user tap:
The species name, taken from text files of names exported from a database and loaded into the recording program as needed and chosen from a drop-down list. The list can be easily searched by clicking on letters on the screen and the species starting with those letters are scrolled to the top of the list:
Latitude (decimal degrees)
Longitude (decimal degrees)
Altitude (metres) The user can enter the departure from the spheroid at the recording location
Accuracy
Date and time of reading
User entered field 1 (entered from a pre-prepared drop-down list, for such data as DAFOR etc.
User entered field 2 (as above)
These programs can be purchased precompiled for various pocket pc processors from the Guernsey Biological Records Centre gsybiorec@cwgsy.net (cheques payable to Guernsey Environmental Services Ltd.) for £17.50. This price will include the source code (vb.net) but without the Franson "serialtools" licence. If the source code is changed a licence will have to be purchased from Franson Serial Tools for the equivalent of $29.95 for the DLL that reads the GPS data from the serial port.
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