2x1=10

I recent­ly bought a Can­more GT-740FL GPS log­ger (labeled Sport Log­Book 740FL GPS on Ama­zon) and found in a review that it can be read out with gpsbabel using the skytraq for­mat (“Sky­Traq Venus based log­gers (down­load)”). That mode’s doc­u­men­ta­tion states that the GT-750FL can be read out, which is indeed true as well for the GT-740FL (despite being a SiRF­s­tar IV device).

On my Ubun­tu box, the log­ger is avail­able as an ACM device (basi­cal­ly a Hayes-style modem) under /dev/ttyACM0; check dmesg | grep tty to be sure.

Here’s the com­mand line to down­load all tracks in GPX for­mat into a tracks.gpx file.

sudo gpsbabel -i skytraq,baud=115200 -f /dev/ttyACM0 \
              -o gpx -F tracks.gpx

It seems though that gpsbabel down­loads every­thing as a sin­gle track (except for man­u­al way­points, of course). Some sources sug­gest using baud=38400,initbaud=4800 instead of the 115200 baud option above when using Win­dows (and for the 730FL, to be exact); I didn’t test that, how­ev­er, as 115.2 kbaud worked fine for me.

To also delete the tracks, you may append the erase option or sim­ply delete all tracks with­out down­load­ing using -i skytraq,erase,no-output.

If you’d like to see live GPS data you may use minicom, e.g. with

sudo minicom -b 115200 -D /dev/ttyACM0

Use CTRL-A, Z to open minicom’s menu, then X to exit.