The RTK Board Sparkfun offers has gotten my interest, but I have a few questions:
I have an existing GPS receiver which is itself connected to a DGPS Beacon receiver and amplified antenna. These units are working well together with correction signals coming from the Coast Guard DGPS beacons here in my state.
I am curious as to whether I could connect my DGPS Beacon receiver directly to your RTK Board’s RTCM port, assuming the baud rates were matched, would the RTK Board work with my existing industry standard DGPS Beacon receiver with the further configuration?
My second question is sort of the opposite approach. If I configured your RTK Board to output RTCM correction strings, could I then connect it to the RTCM port of my existing GPS receiver and have it recognize that connection just as it would have from my DGPS Beacon receiver?
I suppose what I want to know is whether your RTK Board is outputting the same correction strings, and in the same format and baud rate that any existing DGPS capable GPS receiver would recognize as a DGPS beacon signal? (knowing that I would actually need to transmit the information on some unlicensed band other than what the Coast Guard uses.)
I am curious as to whether I could connect my DGPS Beacon receiver directly to your RTK Board’s RTCM port, assuming the baud rates were matched, would the RTK Board work with my existing industry standard DGPS Beacon receiver with the further configuration?
Maybe? Sadly, I can’t give you a definitive answer. As long as your DGPS beacon uses 3.3 volt TTL logic, you should be able to connect it to the serial pins on our RTK GPS boards. We’ve never tested our RTK GPS boards with anything other then our own products so I can’t say for sure if your device and ours will play nicely.
My second question is sort of the opposite approach. If I configured your RTK Board to output RTCM correction strings, could I then connect it to the RTCM port of my existing GPS receiver and have it recognize that connection just as it would have from my DGPS Beacon receiver?
Again, I can’t say for sure since it’s not been tested before. As long as you have the two exchanging data at the right voltage levels, you could give it a try but I don’t know what data your device is looking for and what format it’s expecting the data to be in. My guess is it will probably work but I can’t say for sure.
Wish I were able to help more, but I don’t have the answers to your questions. If anyone else has tried this and can say if it works or not, please share your results.