WM5 GPS Position using GPS Intermediate Driver

External Since: Jul 30, 2008 Posts: 4

Hi,
it took me about two days to get the c# GPS Sample project provided with WM
5/6 SDK running on my PPC 5/6 emulators. Actually I am using the code from
the SDK6 sample to run on my WM5 EMulator and on my WM5 PPC Hardware.
Everything works fine, the Emulator shows the position given from the FakeGPS
Textfile.
But on my PCC (HTC Trin100 where GPS device is built in) the application
never retireves any valid information about the position. It properly shows
the no of satellites using position.SatellitesInViewCountValid. But the
position.LongitudeValid and position.LatitudeValid values are never set to
true, so I can not get the DOUBLE values of the position.

I learned that the GPS Intermediate Driver is the "modern" way of connecting
to the GPS Hardware being able to use it through different apps at the same
time. So I focused on this way of connecting. I also read a few articles
explaining that one has to change the registry of WM to enable GPS, I wonder
if I have to do so and how. I am also confused about the software and
hardware port settings - let's say I would set them to any ports, what effect
might that have to my application, that doesn't have any port definition
inside itself?

Can anyone provide help on this?

Thanks, Markus

External Since: Nov 30, 2005 Posts: 28

MarkusPoehler <poehler.TakeThisOut@etpoint.de> wrote:

>Hi,
>it took me about two days to get the c# GPS Sample project provided with WM
>5/6 SDK running on my PPC 5/6 emulators. Actually I am using the code from
>the SDK6 sample to run on my WM5 EMulator and on my WM5 PPC Hardware.
>Everything works fine, the Emulator shows the position given from the FakeGPS
>Textfile.
>But on my PCC (HTC Trin100 where GPS device is built in) the application
>never retireves any valid information about the position. It properly shows
>the no of satellites using position.SatellitesInViewCountValid. But the
>position.LongitudeValid and position.LatitudeValid values are never set to
>true, so I can not get the DOUBLE values of the position.
>
>I learned that the GPS Intermediate Driver is the "modern" way of connecting
>to the GPS Hardware being able to use it through different apps at the same
>time. So I focused on this way of connecting. I also read a few articles
>explaining that one has to change the registry of WM to enable GPS, I wonder
>if I have to do so and how. I am also confused about the software and
>hardware port settings - let's say I would set them to any ports, what effect
>might that have to my application, that doesn't have any port definition
>inside itself?
>
>Can anyone provide help on this?
>
> Thanks, Markus

Go and test outside, where you get real GPS signal. More than likely
Intermediate driver is just flagging the fact that it is not getting a
real fix.

Yes, you can access the GPS hardware port directly. You probably need
to set your device to NOT manage the GPS. In that case you also neeed
to turn off all other programs using GPS, and access COM port via
CreateFile, and parse the NMEA sentences. Since I have heard nothing
but bad things about HTC products, you may also find out that this
approach may not work on their devices. At some point I was told that
there is an application called port splitter that had to be used in
order to get at raw GPS data on some of these, but this is hearsay.

If you want your application to run on older devices (prior to WM5)
you need to go the raw NMEA data from COM port route.

Cheers,
Henryk