ANT Forum

New guy here...my name is Justin and I am a member of the Pennington County Search and Rescue team in Rapid City, SD. We recently purchased some new Garmin GPS units and in doing some research on them found they use ANT to communicate wireless with eachother.

After reading a little about ANT technology, I had an idea...I saw the ANT USB stick on this site and I'm wondering if that can be used to communicate with the GPS units from a laptop? My idea is that as search parties return to base camp we could wirelessly download the GPS track for analysis AND before the search parties go out to burst transmit map info to all GPS units.

Is this doable, or am I out in left field??

Thanks      

Hello,

This use case sounds perfectly viable to me. ANT has the ability to download from a large number of nodes at a fast rate, as well as the ability to burst to several nodes. However, the Garmin GPS units do not use the ANT+ Network or an ANT+ Device profile, so in order to communicate with the unit, you would need to contact Garmin for their proprietary information.

Best Regards,

Kassy      

Afaik there's a difference between some older types of Garmin units and newer ones, especially fitness oriented ones.
The latter ones are supported by Garmin's "ANT Agent" software, a piece of PC software that automatically transfers data to and from ANT based Garmin GPS devices that are in reach of the ANT USB stick.
ANT Agent keeps sort of a "mirror folder" for the Garmin device on the PC file system and tries to keep the two in sync.
Other's have written software that pulls downloaded data out of these mirror folders and/or injects data to upload into these.

Search Garmin's web site for this software and check which types of GPS devices are supported and if these are "of interest" for you.
Of course this is not an officially announced API, so Garmin might decide to change the way ANT Agent works at any point of time.