[ntp:questions] Sure Electronics GPS board: Amazing performance. :-)

Terje Mathisen "terje.mathisen at tmsw.no" at ntp.org
Fri Mar 11 09:17:36 UTC 2011


Inspired by <http://www.satsignal.eu/ntp/Sure-GPS.htm> and 
<http://www.leapsecond.com/pages/MG1613S/> I ordered one of these 
boards, at a total cost of about $40 including shipping from Hong Kong.

It arrived after a week or so, and so far both USB and RS232 simply 
works. :-)

Receiver sensitivity is really impressive, significantly better than 
even my two SirfSTAR III based GPSs: It acquired all needed sats in a 
few seconds, even from a cold start inside my home.

I am going to solder on a wire for the PPS signal to RS232 pin 1, but 
I'll try to make it even simpler than what David Taylor did:

a) It is possible (but not too likely) that my intended server target 
will work from just 3.3V, so I'll try that first.

b) Since both the PPS and NMEA drivers have fudge flags to use a falling 
instead of the default rising edge of the DCD signal, I can use the 
first version of David's hack, i.e. from the official PPS header via the 
free RS232 level driver (U6 - pin 11->14). This should avoid the need to 
solder anything to U5 pin 8.

Terje

PS. I've sent off emails to SkyNet, manufactor of the SkyLab gps chipset 
used, asking for documentation on how to manually determine both baud 
rate and which NMEA sentences should be sent each second.

I got one test reply from admin at honestar.com, but no other response so far.
-- 
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"




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