Review by Mike Barrett

Price £89.99

Overview

Rikaline is one of a number of Taiwan based GPS manufacturers who are rapidly dominating the mass market for GPS receivers. The parent company www.rikaline.com is in Taipei, Taiwan, but recently they have opened a branch in the UK see www.rikaline.co.uk for details. Rikaline produce a number of GPS receivers, and have just released a new clutch of "high sensitivity" devices. This review looks at the 6010 X5 mouse, there is also the 6021 X6 CF GPS receiver, and the 6037 X7 Bluetooth GPS receiver.

The Rikaline 6010 X5 GPS receiver is available in a number of configurations and is built on a modular cabling system, more of which later.

As with a lot of modern GPS devices it uses the SiRF star II chipset, which boasts high sensitivity and better fixes in "Urban Canyons".

The receiver also comes with SBAS (WAAS/EGNOS) for additional positional accuracy.

The review package I was supplied with came with interface connectors for USB (allowing me to use my laptop) and with an iPAQ connector for my 2210 and 5450 PDAs. This was useful as I needed to test out some Marine software on my laptop, as well as using the receiver in car for normal street navigation. I will break the review down into three sections covering the GPS receiver and the two interfacing options.

The GPS Receiver

The GPS receiver is about 2 inches by 2 1/4 inches in size (50x59mm) with a height of 3/4 inch (20mm). The base of the receiver is both rubberised and magnetic, to stop the mouse escaping when taking sharp bends. Neither of these were very effective in the car that I tested with: a Buick Century with a shiny plastic dash board there was little to stop the GPS skittering around. That said it didn't move about too much.

The cable extends for just over 6 feet (2 metres) and terminates in a PS/2 style female socket. The receiver is also claimed to be waterproof to a depth of 1 metre. Needless to say I didn't test this out.

The receiver can track up to 12 Satellites. There is an onboard battery which is charged whilst powered which maintains the receivers internal GPS clock and memory.

There is an LED which lights when power is applied to the GPS receiver. Having said that in all my tests I never once saw the LED alight despite the fact that the unit was powered and working.

The iPAQ Cable Set

The iPAQ cable set contains a cigar lighter power supply with two connecting cables.

The first is the GPS receiver cable which is a male PS/2 plug, this connects directly into the GPS receiver and both powers the mouse and transfers the data signals.

The second is the iPaq interface cable which connects to your PDA and supplies both power and the data signals.

Both of the cables are about 3 feet (1 metre) long. This proved to be of adequate length when used in a car with the GPS positioned by the edge of the windscreen and the door pillar, with the cigar lighter socket being in the centre of the car.

I left the GPS powered permanently for over a week and had no problems with either the GPS receiver, or the power supply. The power supply remained cool and despite some pretty extreme temperatures high 80's during the day down to high 50's at night there were never any issues with this setup.

The USB Cable Set

The USB cable set provided allowed me to connect the GPS to my laptop. This I wanted to use with some marine navigation software with my laptop down in the cabin. I suspect that the salt air would not be very healthy for the computer.

Once again the cable is just over 3 feet in length and has a small serial to USB converter just before the PS/2 connector.

One thing to watch out for when you connect the GPS is that the computer may recognise it as a serial ballpoint mouse. This is not a big issue. All you have to do is to open up the control panel, select the system icon, click on the Device Manager button in the hardware tab, then find the Microsoft Serial Ballpoint entry under the Mice and pointing devices section and then disable it.

One other item of importance is that you will need to install what is known as the "Prolific USB-to-Serial Comm port driver. This provides the functionality to convert the USB data into normal serial data which allows the GPS to be used as a standard serial device. In my case I had to juggle around a bit as I had a bluetooth adapter installed which gave me lots of serial ports. I had to make sure that the serial devices started at Com4 so that the USB port would be assigned port 2. Some GPS applications will not work with comm ports higher than 6.

Manufacturer's Specifications

Supported Cable sets

The GPS Receiver in use

I have used the receiver now for over a month in a variety of conditions. In all cases I found it sensitive, in terms of signal, and with no 'Lag' associated with some of these high sensitivity GPS receivers.

I used it in the UK then took it over to Florida where On setting it up in the car, loading our two suitcases and my golf clubs into the trunk the receiver had already achieved a strong fix.

Amazingly in my lounge I get an 8 to 10 satellite fix with the receiver positioned about 3 feet from the patio door leading to a conservatory. Other devices I have tested cannot achieve anything like this strength of signal.

The image to the right is the satellite display taken from WinFast Navigator for the PC. It shows that the receiver knows about 11 satellites and has got a fix on 8. Click on the image for a view of the full size Winfast Navigator screen. This shows the full details available on the PC display.

TTFF Timings

This unit appeared to be very quick to get a fix when first firing up. Which was borne out by the timings we made.

* The Hot Fix was either so quick that we were not able to time it or the receiver did not take any notice of the hot fix reset request.

Conclusion

The sensitivity of the Rikaline X5 is really impressive. This unit seems to acquire signals and fixes when other units struggle. I often see 2 to 3 additional satellites used in a fix compared to similar mouse type GPS receivers.

This is an excellent and flexible GPS receiver. If you change your PDA or want to use it with a PC then rather than buy a complete new GPS all you have to do is buy a new cable set. This makes it very easy to put to multiple uses, such as I did using it on the PC and also on my PDAs.

It is difficult to fault this receiver only two slight niggles: despite a magnet and rubberised base the mouse still slides around a bit on the dashboard (this is common with most mice though); and the length of the cable from the cigar lighter power adapter to the iPAQ connector is a little short, it could do with being a few inches longer.

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