Raspberry Pi Forums

Forgive me I'm kind of new to all this but I can't seem to get my GPS to connect or pick up any coordinates.

My particular GPS dongle is "Diymall Vk-172" and it uses a "ublox 7020 chip"

The commands i've run are Running: In the terminal tells me that the device is located at "/dev/ttyACM0"
Then I run: Usually running "cgps" gives me nothing at all. "Status: NO FIX" and it never timesout it just keeps running.
Although while typing this; I tested it and it gave me a "Time" and "Time offset" for the first time, but no other information.
I thought maybe it could be that i'm not getting signal but i've tried it in a different part of my house near a window and figured that would at least give me something and it didn't. I can't even get any of the lights on the dongle to turn on.

I've been looking for answers everywhere and haven't been able to get it to work at all.

Any suggestions?

PuddingPi wrote: Although while typing this; I tested it and it gave me a "Time" and "Time offset" for the first time, but no other information.
I thought maybe it could be that i'm not getting signal but i've tried it in a different part of my house near a window and figured that would at least give me something and it didn't. I can't even get any of the lights on the dongle to turn on.

I've been looking for answers everywhere and haven't been able to get it to work at all.

If you can, query the number of satellites it can see, I think you need at least 4 for a 3D fix, you'll probably get time with just 1. Once it's started receiving data from the satellites it'll probably need to download some data from them so it can do the calculations, this can take 5 minutes with a decent view of the sky, if it's got a limited view it could take much longer.

Getting a good RF view of the sky is important. GPS indoors rarely works and if it's in a window it's still going to have an poor view at best (some windows block RF at GPS frequencies so still may not give that good a view of the sky). Other RF interference can give issues as well. If you can get the GPS module outside with a good view of the sky. It may also help if you can get some seperation (even just a few cms) from the Pi.

Depending on the device type it may also be worth trying it on another system to see if it works there.

gpsmon should default to a ublox 'driver' at least it does for my ublox (though it is a ublox6) and show you direct information.

Or try looking at the output form /dev/ttyACM0 directly, you should see the streams of NMEA codes coming from it. Leave it out the window for a while and see what happened.

(just for completeness, which Pi and a fully up to date Jessie installation?)

bensimmo wrote:gpsmon(just for completeness, which Pi and a fully up to date Jessie installation?)

Raspberry pi 2b, and yes fully updated Jessie.

Thanks for the replies. I'll try to give it a better view of the sky when I get home from work to see if that works.

I've just read some comments on Amazon and they say it takes a long time to get its first initial lock (you should still see valid nmea strings though, just with lots of 0 iirc.)
So just leave it there for an hour, see if it locks. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NWEEWW8?psc=1