REVIEW COMMENTS: RoyalTek RBT3000 Blue GPS

Dave

We have completed our review of the RoyalTek RBT3000 BlueGPS.

The BlueGPS comes with a built-in lithium-ion battery that supports up to 10 hours of use under optimum conditions and has an improved life cycle of 500 charges which is around 100 greater than previous Bluetooth GPS Receivers we have reviewed.

The BlueGPS sports an external MCX antenna connection, a data logger to support 30,000 records, SBAS (WAAS/EGNOS) Support, NMEA-0183 v2.20 and SiRF Star II

The full review can be read here.

TimB · Posted: Thu Oct 09, 2003 9:03 pm Post subject: RoyalTek BlueGPS

Thanks for the review Dave

Looks potentially a very good best of both worlds reciever. Any idea how many £££££s?

Can you clarify a couple of points.

Is it possible to influence battery life by selectively switching off data logging or can bluetooth be switched off when in data logging mode?

and... can you clarify this bit about only communicating the data download through Com port 7? i.e. if you wanted to download the route log to a desktop PC with a bluetooth usb dongle whatsit running say memory-map or ozi-explorer, could it?

Need to get ready to know what to buy when the trusty emtacBT, dies as you would have me believe it will shortly!!

Did you say the RoyalTek blue GPS was the ONLY data logging BTGPS - strikes me it is a route some others ought to follow.

Yours Tim

Dave · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2003 6:37 am Post subject:

Price, Peripheral Corner are advertising is at just under £260 but it's not currently in stock.

You can enable/disable the datalogger, but only from the BlueGPS Application (no hardware way of doing this), and it will probably make a difference to battery performance although I haven't extensively tested this.

COM7 is used as the download port. This is a bit of a pain because most packages, esp on the Pocket PC will only talk to GPS on the Bluetooth port 1 (COM8). If you have an application where you can manually select the COM ports, then you should be okay, this isn't something you could do say on TomTom Navigator unfortunately.

Hopefully you're Emtac will be okay, but we are concerned about lifespans of the Bluetooth GPS. Everyone knows the battery is good for 400+ charges on BT GPS's, but a lot of the BT GPS's we're hearing about are not lasting anywhere near this long, which gives me strong concern!

There will be a lot of other BT GPS's entering the market shortly that will have self contained datalogging like the BlueGPS, so a wider selection will be available say after Christmas.

Hibou · Occasional Visitor Joined: Oct 11, 2003 Posts: 2

Hmm. Are all these ratings on the same scale ? It seems that there is nothing much wrong with the RoyalTek RBT300, its battery lasts longer than most, and it has a unique datalogger which at least seems quite useful for hiking or monitoring car use. And it is available now, not after Christmas, through gpspassion for ~260 Euro not pounds.

Yet it "only" got a rating of 85% compared to 100% for the Emtac BT, which I understand has since failed.

I can understand that the first of anything is always exciting, but how would the Emtac and others rate if they were all examined together now ? And it would be good to hear more of the reasons for the failures of the BT receivers.

Rolling Eyes

Dave · Posted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 7:00 am Post subject:

The RoyalTek is quoted at 10+ hours, but we've only received 8 hours out of it. It does have a datalogger which the Emtac doesn't, but the Emtac's ability to pull in signal still makes it a much better receiver. The RoyalTel also is a big and heavy receiver comared to the Emtac.

We will be offering a user rating system in the near future which will allow you to select Receivers and rate them depending on the features that matter to you, giving you a virtual rating system.

pendersm · Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2004 1:50 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I am a quite happy user of the Royaltek BT GPS. I bought it, as it was the first one available with the datalog functionality. The (rather straightforward) software that comes with it, allows to convert datalogs easily to e.g. NMEA formats, that can further be read or converted (e.g. OziExplorer and a conversion utility called Geoconv). I also managed to reply a datalog and simultaneously record in OziExplorer by fiddling a little with the COM-ports. However, with datalogs of x-1000 lines, this becomes a bit cumbersome, therefor I looked for a conversion utility.

I find it difficult to locate a supplier that delivers some or all of the accessoires?

Best regards,

Mark Penders
Maastricht, The Netherlands.

Dave · Posted: Wed Feb 25, 2004 2:46 pm Post subject:

This is always a strange issue because most companies tend to suggest to the public that they make less profit on accessories hence the reason they don't want to stock them, but in-fact they usually make more on accessories.

I haven't found a company yet stocking RBT accessories, but Peripheral Corner in the UK sell the RBT 3000 at http://www.peripheralcorner.co.uk and http://www.BuyGPSNow.com in the states

anil · Posted: Sun May 09, 2004 3:26 pm Post subject: ATTN: Pocket GPS Staff

Hello All: I haven't been able to use the RBT 3000 in a receiver mode. I have a laptop with a mapping application (Map Objects based) and all I need to be able to do is to make a connection between this application and the RBT 3000. Can someone guide me as to what configuration mistake I am making? Many thanks,
-Anil, Dubai

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