AnyTrack redux, flaky in NYC
I felt bad about my harsh review of the AnyTrack monitoring device (and the inflated Sprint cell coverage that gives it Assisted GPS abilities). So I held on to the unit, and tried it again on a trip to Cape Cod, where it did pretty well. I also brought it to New York City, where I figured its claimed ability to determine location inside buildings would really shine. Well, not so much. The AnyTrack locator/transceiver and I are ensconced in my mom’s apartment at the corner of 16th St and 6th Ave (aka Avenue of the Americas), but time after time AnyTrack.net—full screen here —claims to locate the unit with “HIGH” accuracy at 84 5th Ave., which is quite a ways away if you were actually trying to find something in this dense urban environment. And that’s despite the fact that I’ve wandered the neighborhood with the unit in my pocket and set to 10 minute auto tracking, which it performed only so so. I can only conclude that this technology needs a lot of work.
Ben, I think you have made the decision of whether or not to invest in this a fairly simple one…
We need to have an NYC Panbo gathering one of these days!
Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist or anything, but aren’t there rumors that GPS accuracy in the NYC area general is “off.” I ran a boat up from FL to MA recently and had no problems with the E120 for hundreds of miles. But once I passed under the Verrazano Bridge the thing went nuts, showing me as much as a quarter mile off track and right in the middle of Manhattan.
I use a Garmin IQue3600 for both auto nav and in my cockpit. In NYC it is quite accurate if you consider that it place me on a street. I don’t know that it allows for lane width accuracy, but I don’t get fixes inside of buildings from the car.
It does lose the fix from the shadows of building quite a lot though.