How to Test GPS?

[Creepin_D]

Well I bought a Microsoft Pharos GPS-500 to go along with marine software. I can not get the GPS to work with the software so now I need to figure out where my problem is. I need to know how to test the GPS. I was told to use hyper terminal to test it, and when I do all I get is a bunch of symbols always scrolling through the screen. I have no idea what I am looking at and is that what it suppose to look like ??

 

[pm]

I've debugged a GPS using hyperterminal - a long time ago I built a GPS from scratch (because I'm weird). First, if you are getting garbage out, make sure you set the baud rate, data, parity and stop bits correctly. If you get any of those wrong then you'll get weird symbols out. How do you know what to set? I'm not sure. When I did it, I had the full specsheet for the GPS chip that I used.

Googling, it looks like typically it's 4800 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. But the specific setting depends on the GPS itself.
http://www.boondog.com/tutorials/gps/gps.html#Terminal

Second in order to be legible, the GPS needs to be outputting NMEA ASCII. There are other modes that are binary data (everything mashed together and compressed) and they won't be viewable. On the GPS that I made there were three settings and I had to configure the firmware to use the one that I wanted (which was NMEA).

Anyway try setting the baud and parity and stop bits and see what you see.

(for the backstory, I wanted a GPS to use in a very, very small R/C electric model airplane and so I wanted something super light. So I looked around and I couldn't find anything really small enough, so I ended up buying a GPS chip from Sparkfun (www.sparkfun.com) and rigged it together, made my own GPS antenna and then built a wireless downlink that sort of worked... sort of. It never really worked like I wanted, but I didn't spend much and I learned a lot and had fun doing it... and when it did work, it was like magic. Eventually I built an SD-card data logger that read NMEA and then decoded it on my computer, not as much fun but the data was always all there. The GPS that I used was an earlier version of this http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8825 with a breakout board)

 

[DivideBYZero]

I've debugged a GPS using hyperterminal - a long time ago I built a GPS from scratch (because I'm weird). First, if you are getting garbage out, make sure you set the baud rate, data, parity and stop bits correctly. If you get any of those wrong then you'll get weird symbols out. How do you know what to set? I'm not sure. When I did it, I had the full specsheet for the GPS chip that I used.

Googling, it looks like typically it's 4800 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. But the specific setting depends on the GPS itself.
http://www.boondog.com/tutorials/gps/gps.html#Terminal

Second in order to be legible, the GPS needs to be outputting NMEA ASCII. There are other modes that are binary data (everything mashed together and compressed) and they won't be viewable. On the GPS that I made there were three settings and I had to configure the firmware to use the one that I wanted (which was NMEA).

Anyway try setting the baud and parity and stop bits and see what you see.

(for the backstory, I wanted a GPS to use in a very, very small R/C electric model airplane and so I wanted something super light. So I looked around and I couldn't find anything really small enough, so I ended up buying a GPS chip from Sparkfun (www.sparkfun.com) and rigged it together, made my own GPS antenna and then built a wireless downlink that sort of worked... sort of. It never really worked like I wanted, but I didn't spend much and I learned a lot and had fun doing it... and when it did work, it was like magic. Eventually I built an SD-card data logger that read NMEA and then decoded it on my computer, not as much fun but the data was always all there. The GPS that I used was an earlier version of this http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8825 with a breakout board)

Wow, that's pretty sweet!

 

[Creepin_D]

I've debugged a GPS using hyperterminal - a long time ago I built a GPS from scratch (because I'm weird). First, if you are getting garbage out, make sure you set the baud rate, data, parity and stop bits correctly. If you get any of those wrong then you'll get weird symbols out. How do you know what to set? I'm not sure. When I did it, I had the full specsheet for the GPS chip that I used.

Googling, it looks like typically it's 4800 baud, 8 bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. But the specific setting depends on the GPS itself.
http://www.boondog.com/tutorials/gps/gps.html#Terminal

Second in order to be legible, the GPS needs to be outputting NMEA ASCII. There are other modes that are binary data (everything mashed together and compressed) and they won't be viewable. On the GPS that I made there were three settings and I had to configure the firmware to use the one that I wanted (which was NMEA).

Anyway try setting the baud and parity and stop bits and see what you see.

(for the backstory, I wanted a GPS to use in a very, very small R/C electric model airplane and so I wanted something super light. So I looked around and I couldn't find anything really small enough, so I ended up buying a GPS chip from Sparkfun (www.sparkfun.com) and rigged it together, made my own GPS antenna and then built a wireless downlink that sort of worked... sort of. It never really worked like I wanted, but I didn't spend much and I learned a lot and had fun doing it... and when it did work, it was like magic. Eventually I built an SD-card data logger that read NMEA and then decoded it on my computer, not as much fun but the data was always all there. The GPS that I used was an earlier version of this http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8825 with a breakout board)[/QUOTE

Thanks for your help, but I still can not get this figured out. When I highlight the GPS in device manager and click properties this is the information that I am given.

COM 6
Bits Per Second: 9600
Data Bits: 8
Parity: none
Stop Bits: 1
Flow Control: none

I enter all of this into hyper terminal and I still get all the strange symbols. Is there any software besides hyper terminal that I can try?? Thanks

 

[IronWing]

In what mode is the GPS unit set to transfer data?