Since some of the damage from last night was across the street from my kids’ school, I set off from there this morning with only a Nokia N95 as assistance. For those who don’t know, this cameraphone is pretty nice:

• 5 megapixel camera (works fine outdoors, though some pics come out a bit blurry it is acceptable)
• built-in GPS
• can geo-tag and upload pictures to Flickr.com with “zonetag” software, for instant viewing by a remote user in Google Earth.

I basically drove around and took pictures with the phone and then uploaded them. It seemed great! Only, when I got back to NSSL, I discovered that it didn’t really go so well:

• GPS locations were not quite accurate due to some sky blockage (big trees). Next time I’ll bring my SIRF3 (highly accurate) bluetooth GPS to connect to the phone, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having built-in GPS!
• At some point, my phone reset, and it lost the GPS logging. Of course, it didn’t tell me this, and even though it was still uploading pictures they were all geotagged to the location where it reset. Oops!
• This meant that I had to manually position the rest of the photos (and remember where I took them) using Google Earth / Picasa to make the KML file.

The practical upshot is that the GPS Logger / regular digital camera survey method will still work better, unless you want to auto-upload your results to a web site.

(Travis Smith)