Miscellaneous Operating Systems/Hardware

So I bought this Etak ET-GPS1 PCMCIA GPS adapter for my laptop and of course, no driver was included so all I had was google.
A bit of searching found a hint that if I installed the card as a 9600 baud serial port and set the protocol switch to NMEA it would still work well enough for Streets and Trips to get a fix on my position.
Needless to say, something is not right.


No matter how long I let the GPS take a fix on its position, I'm locked directly on that location and either this is because of my attempt to work without a driver or the GPS itself is stuck here. I have no idea how to determine what's the culprit.

Open up a terminal program, and 'talk' to the GPS... IIRC it'll just spew clock timings and stuff... but as you 'move' around they should change......

And for what it's worth, every time I go to Brooklyn, my GPS tells me I'm in the middle of the Hudson river.... It's a little annoying.

Can I presume that people know that GPS devices support multiple coordinate systems? Or does nobody actually lookup coordinates on a map anymore and let the device just do everything?

It's called NMEA and it'll tell you anything you want. It's also a very well-documented protocol. Just Google NMEA, get a terminal emulator, and hit up the GPS.

I suspect it's a coordinate system issue like porter thinks.

Well I finally managed to get a proper output at 4800, 8, N,1 and...


Translation...

It looks okay but the output is obviously fixed. I'm sitting here at my computer inside the house and it's not possible for this to get a satellite signal.

Maybe it's just giving default data due to lack of satellites. Etak was based in Menlo Park which isn't far from your indicated position fix (San Mateo county).

Well then I'll go setup the laptop on the deck and leave the GPS and the system alone for an hour or so to see what it does.

Note that NMEA gives you fix status and active satellites so there shouldn't be any guesswork...

I left it out for two hours and that was enough for it to dump the stale satellite data and reload everything. It now sees me in the correct location.

Edit: Yep. It's working perfectly now.