one of the GPS recedivers im considering communicates according to the protocol specified in NMEA 0183, Version 3.01. This specification costs around $300, which at the moment i cant afford. im wondering whether there are any other methods of doing this. any help in this regard is appreciated.
Just for GPS you don't need the spec. The GPS portion of NMEA is well understood and well documented by hobbyists. Besides, NMEA transmit data in ASCII text so it's easily human readable, debugged and reverse engineered.
The following sites have been helpful to me:
Especially this one because it documents a lot of the quirks of different GPS receivers which you definitely wouldn't get with the official NMEA spec:
thanks a lot for the information. ill be going through your suggestions.
See the NMEA FAQ on
NMEA-0183 (any version) is basically plain ASCII text sent at 4800 baud. It should be fairly easy to figure out the content of the sentences by comparing the data to that displayed by the GPS (and/or applying some common sense...)
-- Peter Bennett, VE7CEI peterbb4 (at) interchange.ubc.ca new newsgroup users info : http://vancouver-webpages.com/nnq GPS and NMEA info: http://vancouver-webpages.com/peter Vancouver Power Squadron: http://vancouver.powersquadron.ca
My line of work is systems engineering, frequently on defence systems and often think that the cost of commercial standards must have greatly reduced their use. I'm sure the wholesale ditching of the old MIL-STD series has not been a good thing.
-- Jim Backus running OS/2 Warp 3 & 4, Debian Linux and Win98SE bona fide replies to j backus jita demon co uk
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