To start off, this will be a type of review of a product I bought on Amazon, I have to state that I have no connection at all with the seller, or manufacturer, my only connection is that I’ve included an Amazon affiliate link in this post, so if you buy one from that link I’d get some monetary benefit. I bought one with my own money.
Overall, I like it very much. But I have a couple negatives.
The positives is that it is quite easy to set up. You will have to solder on the supplied 5 pin header in order to connect to it via the UART, and to get access to the PPS signal. The UART connection is just like any other GPS module, and I was able to substitute it in to my Raspberry PI time server, in place of the original module (Which I was borrowing from one of my ham radios), very easily.
It takes a few minutes to get the first fix (and by the way, it needs to be near a window). but after that it gets a fix within seconds, since it has an onboard battery to keep it’s memory of the last satellites it heard.
I like it because it is really small as you can see in the picture, and came with a patch antenna, and it is inexpensive at $10.99 (at time of writing this).
One more plus is it must not draw much power. My Raspberry PI 2 is pretty marginal on available power for peripherals.. but I’ve checked and got no power drops or throttling while using it.
Now the down sides. Though it has a micro-usb connector on it, and if you look at the traces on the board it is wired to provide data on USB, I could not figure out how to get USB going with it and my Raspberry PI. A downside being there are no instructions, and also no web articles about how to make that work. Why no web articles? Well probably because everyone is using the UART connection, not USB.
The patch antenna was a little tricky to install. Probably mostly because of my bad close vision, but with magnification, it became clear how the connector connects.
Also twice now, upon power up, yes it gets a fix, yes it gets accurate time (My main purpose for it), but no, it has a completely wrong location. What I’ve found is just power cycling it, and it will get a good location. I can’t explain it, but it’s possible mine is not getting a good signal all the time, I have it in a sun room, that has 3 walls of all windows. I haven’t dug in to why it is doing this, but I do know it has nothing to do with antenna placement, since once I power cycled it without moving it at all, and the problem went away.
I definitely will buy it again for any other time keeping applications, and I may buy one just to play with.
Click the image to check it out on Amazon, if you buy through that link it will helps support this blog.
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