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Showing posts from December, 2023

Free GPS and a Merry Christmas

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 Season's greetings to one and all. I've been fascinated with GPS and GNSS in general for quite some time now, it feels rather miraculous that, for only a few pounds, I can buy a module not much larger than my thumb that will reliably provide my position anywhere on the planet to within a few metres by receiving signals from flying atomic clocks several thousand miles above my head. I've probably got far too many GPS receivers but recently someone posted an offer of free for the cost of postage receiver modules to the GQRP mailing list and it was too good an offer to turn down.  A few days later some nice little Leadtek modules arrived, complete with coax pigtails. As well as the modules, there was a zip file with pinout for the 1mm (?) pitch connector on the underside and a datasheet for the module itself. While they're quite old, they have a SiRFStar chipset which is a decent performer and I've always found them to be reliably fast to get and hold a fix.  Unfortun