Mifi GPS

Seems there is a link to the windows drivers in the webpage you mentioned. Cannot just download?

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I can only download the PDF docs and the Windows driver, but not the flash tool and the other one :frowning:

There is also no link to any firmware files either…

I see. Maybe this is normal. Hope you can get them from Quectel.

Well that is kinda sad. I only get “AT+QGPSLOC? +CME ERROR: 516” using the small antenna, which means no fix.
No idea if it’s just bad or if it’s too weak…

NVM,
I did get a lock :stuck_out_tongue:

AT+QGPSLOC? +QGPSLOC: 172354.0,5948.0807N,01822.1703E,1.7,45.0,2,292.19,0.0,0.0,140518,08 OK

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Yea was just about to post and say “Give it time and a clear view of the sky” ;o)

Somewhere in the docs there is a description of the process you can use to help speed up the lock process (it involves periodically downloading a file and pushing it to the modem module).

Yeah i do that on my Ublox M8N for my drones :smiley:

Well now that the antenna does work, and i did get a lock from just near the window (but with the antenna out of the case) i am trying to figure out where to put it now. Maybe i make a slot on the case, not sure yet.

Ok so yeah. If you want GPS you can get any active ipex antenna and it will work. However, the performance of the GPS is quite poor. With the antenna outside of the case it takes tens of minutes to get a lock, inside the case sometimes you get, sometimes not. Seems like the gps inside the quectel modem has no amplifier and is quite slow.

You are better off using your phone for any location services, or get a dedicated high quality gps such as a ublox M8N with amplifier, that gives a lock in around 2min constantly, with 20+ satellites. Using addon data you can get a lock in a few seconds.

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Taking a look through this thread, I was able to get the GPS working – though no fix indoors without an antenna (no surprise there - have a uFL/SMA cable and an external antenna which are inbound today.

Couple questions/suggestions:

  • Is it possible to keep the GPS enabled between reboots, or does it need to be reset with the AT command every time?

  • Would it be possible to have GPSD included (you can opkg install it, plus the gpsd-clients) by default? And, with that, is it possible to configure NTPD to talk to GPSD for time? I’m guessing theres going to be limits on how accurate it will be, as I’m not sure that a “pps” signal exists out of the gps, but this would all be nice to see, in my opinion.

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  1. For quectel - no, enable it every restart
  2. ugps is also nice i small solution.

Using the imagebuilder you can set what extra packages you want as default in the firmware, such as gpsd.

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