From Trailguru

This article covers many frequently asked questions about Trailguru for the iPhone 3G.

Why am I not getting any recorded tracks?

Some ideas to check are the following:

1. Make sure that you approve Trailguru to obtain current location when it starts up.
2. Make sure location services are enabled in Settings->General
3. Make sure airplane mode is not on.

Why did the iPhone not record all of my activity?

Usually troubles in capturing your track boil down to one of two problems:

1. The iPhone put the Trailguru application to sleep. Make sure that you leave the Trailguru application running as the foreground application as you do your activity. If you are going to listen to music, then most users find that you can lock the iPhone because the music application will keep the iPhone active. If you are not going to listen to music, then most users find that you must not lock the iPhone.
2. The iPhone does not have a good view of the GPS satellites in the sky. The iPhone needs a clear view of the sky so that it can acquire a signal lock on the GPS satellites that are required to establish location. If you are carrying your iPhone in a backpack (for instance) try to place the phone in the top of your pack, and most importantly, avoid placing any metallic objects between it and the sky.
3. The iPhone can't get an initial fix using a cellular network. The iPhone uses a variant of GPS called AGPS (Assisted GPS) that, in weak GPS signal situations, relies on having a identifying the cellular network you are connected to in order to get a rough idea of where you are located. For this reason, it is recommended that you leave the cellular network on in at least 2G mode.

How much of my data plan does Trailguru use?

1. When you are just using the GPS you are not using any of your data plan. The iPhone's GPS operates for the most part through an onboard chip and only uses the cellular network for assist in determining location.
2. The only time the application uses the network is when you post a track. You are using roughly 100 bytes a track for this out of your data plan but you can also use your WiFi network at home to upload. In this case, again, you use none of your data plan.
3. If you utilize the map functionality of the Trailguru application, Trailguru uses a data connection to contact and download map images at approximately 56KB of data per full map screen. It should have to only do this once so one strategy to minimize this is to load all the tiles you will need for your activity while you are on your home WiFi network my scrolling through the map and then going out and doing your activity. Trailguru does not use any bandwidth for the loading of map tiles if you don't use the map functionality.

How do I change my timezone or my preferred measurement units on the web site?

You can change both of these by clicking the My Preferences link at the top right above this page or any other wiki page.

Why is the speed displayed sometimes very wrong?

Trailguru uses the iPhone's GPS for measuring speed. The iPhone's GPS is both inaccurate at times (which means that Trailguru thinks you have covered too much or too little ground over a time period) and also has a fair amount of latency between samples (so sometimes it thinks you covered that distance over too small or too large a time period). Both of these combine at times to provide inaccurate speed samples and for that reason, you should take the speed displayed with a grain of salt.