Hey
@Linton Pull up a chair, heres a bit of light reading. Theres is nothing im aware of that will fulfil your brief. Its a very complex set of wants, particularly the live online monitoring aspect. I think anything packaged that comes close will be for a proprietry outcome, and remove any controls on the data that youll likely want.
Live online monitoring can only be achieved via a satellite based system. We used Spot Gen3 which provided that feature along with a check in function and epirb style alert function (although we have a Sat phone anyway). The Spot Gen3 had a $250 annual subscription plus device cost, but it a proprietory system that wont intergrate with any other system. It will allow people to follow you and it also records all your antics in raw data for download and later use, but it wont address your other wants. There are phone Apps that will also track you and create data files, but no-one can watch that live as they arent live uploads, plus its just another jerkaround each day to set it up to record, stop, save and file. Out of all the people who enthusiastically vowed to follow our live Spot Gen3 tracking, the number that actually did was zero ... because in reality its a little boring and pointless. We did check in on friends who also had one that we met on the road, and that was kinda cool. The camp check-ins that where posted to our blog each night via the Spot Gen3 had a large following.
There are a some hands on and labour intensive Apps and programs that will add a lot of what you want into a variety of Google Earth compatible files. You can (later) manually manipulate these files to eventually have the complete package of your trip but that would be after the trips over. To try to achieve this during the trip, there's a lot of labour that will impact on why your doing the lap to start with ... looking outwards and enjoying what the country has to offer
None of these App and programs are dymamic ie they wont perform any auto upload function.
An example of one problem an all encompassing App or program will present. After our trip, prompted by the Spot Gen3 costs I wrote an Android App that automatically sends my camp location to my self hosted blog. We have a Sat Phone so we never really needed the epirb feature, we no longer give a crap whos watching anyway. I now use my App to post our camp site location to our blog when we pitch camp. Because its a phone App it is only effective in cell data areas. The App knows its not in a cell area but it passes the request to another function which couldnt care less if theres no cell data. In short the App gives the data to an inbuilt feature which throws out of the phone and thinks its done a good job. With no cell service the data just lands in the ground and thats the end of it, i doesnt try again. Ive over come that so a point by also writing all data to a file so i can manually post it later. If i added the outcomes of that App to another App the domino effect would balls up everthing.
The point is it is a very complicated system particularly for an App, and on some level its failures will impact other features. Any feature packed App will keep your data captive for use in, as you found, their paid for services.
On our lap I used the Spot Gen3, and cameras with geotagging. After the trip I used software to extract the geodata from each pic and then plot each pic with added descriptions and stories in a Google Earth compatible file. I used the Spot Gen3 data to plot our entire path, along with each camp site each style with its their own identifiable icons.
The end result is a single huge 1gb Google Earth file that had our path, campsites and selected photos with stories. It a pretty impressive outcome, if i am to pump up my our tyres. That creation of the file was a intensive labour of love to create with each of the gazillion pics individually laballed and many where the geotagging failed needed to be manually geotagged. The end result is a standalone Google Earth file, so it works on any computer with Google Earth and i also uploaded it to my server for online access.
I blogged every single bloidy freaken day of our lap ... errrrrr. 405 entries ... errrrrrr. My god that was horrendous. Its a lot of (read bloody HUGE) friggin around, but 2 years after the trip ended im so so glad i went to the trouble and invested in it.
Its a feature filled and detail filled account written by us warts and all that our son will have forever.
My biggest tip is backup everything, every day
