NaviGadget

Wintec WBT-100/200 Bluetooth GPS Receiver

Jun 6, 2006 bluetooth, fitness, gps navigation

The Wintec WBT-200 had been in development since last year and is now becoming available in the USA Semsons. A forum member had pointed it out to me last year but I had not been able to obtain a test model at the time. With Semsons now carrying it, that became possible and they sent me a WBT-100 test unit in May, the WBT-100 is the WBT-200 with a built-in compass, but it is not integrated very usefully in the unit yet (only blinks fast when facing North) and requires a connection to a PC for actual readings that don’t appear to be accurate.

Here are my observations and measurements :
1. Form factor: the WBT is indeed very small, it feel like a small “pebble” and has a nice rubbery feel to it, one of the best designs I’ve seen.

2. GPS Performance:
1. Fastrax/uNav chipset : I was curious to its performance as it uses a Fastrax chipset, which is a variation of the uNav chipset that did not perform very well on the Emtac S3 GPS in the chipset review last year.
2. Good TTFF and Guidance : It had no trouble getting a fix with the standard 45/50 seconds in a good environment for a cold reset and providing some good guidance in the small streets of Paris connected to a JasJar running iGo 2006
3. Sensitivity : with its logger feature, it was important for it to have good sensitivity and it disappoints a bit in that area, not reaching the level of a SiRFstarIII unit or of the Nemerix v4 based GPS as seen in the table below. While it remains decent with some margin above the required 3 satelltites it did lose the fix a bit even placed directly under the windshield

4. Accuracy : a close inspection of the actual tracks showed that it did not offer tracking as precise as the Nemerix v4 based iBlue that excelled in the challenging environment seen in the picture below or as the SiRFstarIII BT-338 that had some problems as well. This is likely due to less advanced multipath management. Not a problem for casual use, but it you need good accuracy then you should keep this in mind.

Blue=BT338, Green=iBlue, Red=WBT100
3. Battery life: comes in at about 11 hours for continuous GPS use, which is quite a feat considering the size of the battery, of the BL-4C type, previously used on the Royaltek RBT-1000 and 2001, where it was only good for 6 hours of continuous use.

4. USB GPS: There have been other mixed Bluetooth/USB GPS receivers in the past from Holux and Fortuna, but they required a special USB cable with, not so with the WBT-200 that can be used as a mouse GPS with a standard USB cable

5. Data Logger: The data logger works as expected and the G-Tool PC software (can be downloaded here if you want to demo it) has a convenient feature to convert a log directly to the Google Earth format on top of .GPX and Papago (MapKing). You can choose automatic modes or record data at a set time or distance and it can log up to 12,680 points.

Final words : An interesting unit overall with a very pleasing form factor and some novel features at at a good price. A bit more sensitivity and accuracy would have been nice for more advanced use, but I understand the Wintec engineers are fine-tuning the firmware so that might come later.

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