The Signal
So the idea is that your meant to carry the iphone in the water with you, for this we’re recommending you use a Aquapac waterproof case. It’s been designed to put your iphone in but just to make sure we’ve been putting ours in small sandwich bags and taping the bag closed. In the initial stages of the project we used a vest to carry the iphone and surfing in warmer water than we are you need to use the vest if your not wearing a wetsuit. When we teamed up with the guys from MSW they were keen for us to try it out under the suit and guess what…. it worked now i’ve been putting the iphone in the x-zip part of my xcel infinity and it works a treat. The vest does present the iphone to the satellites perfectly so some of the time i’m still using mine. This brings me on tho this point about the capability of the iphones GPS a few people have commented that the GPS is renowned as being a bit ropey. In answer to that i would agree if your in the middle of a city, this has not been designed to work in the middle of a city and nor was the original applications of GPS. The original marine applications of GPS took into account there would be no physical blocking of the signal by any type of structure. Paddling around out at sea the iphone has a perfect view of the satellites and receives a signal that enables us to feed back the speed and locational statistics in the app. The only people that have GPS reception issues with the iphone are townies, wavetracks is for tacking surfing not navigating your way around Paris so we’ve really had no reception issues.
After intensive research into waves we’re asking the app to identify good rides, it is missing the odd shit ride but identifying poor rides means that there is more to do for the user, i’m going to look at the data over the next couple of day and the next release will have to identification of potential rides and confirmed rides.
