Looking for some help for our upcoming Beacon Test in July.

G7ToWin http://www.gpsinformation.org/ronh/ is a program that will allow you to get a bitmap screenshot of a GPS display. One of our volunteers used this last year as an experiment and it worked very nice, compared to our use of photographs of the screen. We take photographs of the satellite screen to show how many satellites are in view, their signal strength and configuration, and the lat/lon location. See below for samples:

Screenshot Bitmap Image from G7toWin (converted to JPEG):



Photo image of GPS Screen (reduced down for display here, so actual image is better, but still no comparison to clarity of bitmap image above)



Right now it seems the only way to do this is to copy to the clipboard, then copy to a graphics program and then save with a descriptive file name. Way too slow and awkward to use in the field. What I'd like to be able to do is allow a volunteer to just press a button at the start of a particular test and it would automagically grab the bitmap image every 5 or 10 seconds from the Garmin GPS, it takes a few seconds just to write the bitmap via the serial port, and save it with a date and time stamp of some sort. Even better if we could note the particular test (Baseline, Marine or Inland and Alpha - Zulu) and beacon make and model (could also be a drop down selection, only testing four beacons types).

Would anyone here be interested in taking a stab at something like this? Must be done and fully tested and debugged, ready to go by end of June.

Thanks,