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Article by
Dave Burrows
There's now been a few forum
posts and emails to us regarding Pretec problems, where the manuals are corrupt
and the GPS Demo's are also corrupt like we originally specified in our
review, so we've created some instructions
below that will help you get started in testing the GPS Receiver.
Firstly what you need to do is to make sure the
GPS Receiver is functioning properly before you start messing around with
settings in various GPS applications.
1. Download the GPS Demo
from our downloads page.
2. Put your Pocket PC into the cradle and obtain
an ActiveSync session
3. Extract the GPSDemo_4800_iPAQ.exe from the ZIP
file and copy it to anywhere on the Pocket PC using the EXPLORE button in
ActiveSync.
4. Now undock the Pocket PC from the cradle
5. Insert your Pretec CF GPS Receiver card into
your CF Card slot.
6. Soft reset your Pocket PC
7. Now open up Explorer on the Pocket PC and
browse to where you copied the GPS Demo executable. Now click this to run
it.
You should first be greeted with a screen like in
fig 1. This will then change to the GPS Status screen as
seen in fig 2. At first you will not see any satellites, but
over a period of time whilst the Receiver is attempting to receive satellite
signals, these should start to appear and then change to blue when it's actively
receiving data.
Depending on whether the GPS Receiver is starting
from cold, you may have to wait a long period, eg 5 minutes to 15 minutes to
acquire the first fix, be patient. There's no setting to select in the GPS
Demo, so if something goes wrong, eg an error occurs, or you don't get any
satellite signals whatsoever, you have a problem! Once you start to
acquire a fix and receive satellite locks you should start to see a picture like
in fig 3 where you see satellites jotted around the circle, and
also starting to acquire green fixes.
Looking at fig 4 once you have
achieved a full lock, all of the satellite numbers and strengths down the right
hand side of the screen will show green, and at the bottom of the screen you
should see 3D like in fig 4. This shows you have a
proper lock in 3D mode.
If you now click on the POSITION button,
this should then bring up the Lattitude and Longitude co-ordinates.
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