Since those scripts only run on Windows XP and i use a MacBook Pro for my main computer, I had to come up with a creative solution using a single Sprint EVDO card with multiple computers.

I took a bunch of gear and my older Sony Vaio laptop and made a mobile wifi hotspot powered by EVDO.

So this is how I did it.

Gear list:
PCMCIA to ExpressCard (for Merlin EX720 EVDO Card)
Buffalo WiFi Router
USB GPS
Power Inverter

The first thing to do was to get the EVDO Card working in my Vaio, since the card is a ExpressCard and the laptop only has a PCMCIA slot. This required purchasing converter card. Most of the places that were in the US wanted over $59 for a converter card. Since it will mostly be used on this trip and not much in the future we thought it was crazy to pay that price (we actually needed a few of these for other reasons). WIth a little research, we found some on eBay for $20 shipped from Hong Kong. After waiting a week they arrived and worked flawlessly.

Now that we have the internet working on the Vaio it was time to get the internet shared with the WiFi router. To do this I followed the guide over at EVDOinfo. After that I setup and configured the WiFi router by taking the ethernet cable and plugging it into the LAN port on the laptop and then the WAN port on the router. This makes the internet from the laptop look like it is connected to a normal DSL, Cable modem.

Since the EVDO card looks like a regular dial up modem to the computer, I set it up to redial if the connection is dropped. This makes it extremely reliable in the middle of nowhere when you go out of cell tower range.

Now that the router is working, the next step was to enable WEP to make sure that only the computers we wanted were allowed to log in. This is to prevent unauthorized computers from slowing my connection down.

So now that we have our mobile Hot Spot I moved on to the GPS tracking. We are doing this with both a server side and client side script.

Here is a quick overview of script activities:

1. My Vaio runs a program that talks to the GPS to get our location and speed
2. The program sends that information to a database on the server. NOTE: When you view the map on the page it is getting the information from the database.
3. Every few seconds the website refreshes the map with new data from the database making it appear almost analog to the viewer.

We started with PUR tracker (mp3car.com) and had to make a few modifications as it came with a few bugs, the worst of which was placing the decimal point in the wrong place causing the GPS coordinates to go all over the place.

After we got that working it was time to embed it into the page. For this I used an object embed for most well engineered browsers but as always Internet Explorer decided it would not display properly, so for IE users we use an iframe. To detect what browser it is we used a simple script.

        <!--[if IE]>
	Put iframe here
	<![endif]-->
	<!--[if !IE]> <-->
        Put object embed here
	<!----> <!--[endif]--

So now that everything is setup and our Mobile Hot Spot is up and running it appears to be pretty low maintenance (knock on wood!).