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If I place an order in the morning, I can pick it up in the afternoon, which is very convenient (and avoids any shipping charges). I use this one because Sparkfun happens to be a few miles from my house. There are many similar boards available, some are definitely less expensive. I am using a USB to UART converter board (FTDI) from Sparkfun to do this. If you are using M8N receivers with a UART interface rather than USB then it is a bit more complicated since we need to first convert the UART signals to USB. In that case you are done and can skip to the next post. If you use the M8T receivers from CSG with a USB interface that I suggested in my last post, then this step is trivial, just use two USB cables to connect the receivers to the laptop. There are other ways to get base station data that would allow you to use only one receiver, especially if you are doing post-processing rather than real-time positioning, but for these tutorials, I will assume you are using two receivers.
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I did all my initial testing with two receivers, one as the base station reference and one as the rover. It's OK to get everything configured on the laptop in the house, but be sure to choose a location with open skies away from buildings and trees when your ready to collect your first real data.
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You will not get usable data if you try to collect data inside a building, so don't waste time trying this on a desktop computer. For testing though, the simplest way to get started is to plug both receivers directly into the USB ports of a laptop.
#Pc usb gps receiver portable#
For practical use, most likely you will want to eventually connect the GPS receivers to battery powered low cost single board computers, such as a Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone, to make them portable and stand-alone.