I recently purchased a ZOE-M9N GPS board because two earlier Sparkfun GPS boards that I purchased (ZOE-M8Q and XA1110) would not find any satellites. Well, the M9N can’t either. All 3 boards have a chip antenna and are being used out-of-the-box with a RedBoard Qwiic using the basic example in the Arduino library.
Admittedly I do not have an ideal setup. The units sit on a window ledge up against the glass, but with only about a third or so of the sky visible. It is enough of a view, however, that my smartphone sitting mere inches away has no trouble picking up a dozen or so satellites and getting a good fix.
See attached pictures. Plenty of satellites visible and if you look closely at one of the pictures, a good lat, lon fix.
Meanwhile the Arduino code displays number of satellites = 0 forever. I have invested $160 in these 3 boards and none of them work.
It would be an excellent idea to take them outdoors, to where they have an unobstructed view of the sky.
Not possible. I do not have a laptop and have no reason otherwise to buy one. They will eventually go in remote, battery-powered devices but I need them to work on the window ledge to develop code for that use. Besides, if they will not work where a phone does, that does not inspire much confidence in them.
Your phone gets a lot of it’s “gps” data from the cellular network and not from actual gps satellites and that’s why it works where your boards don’t.
Gps isn’t designed to work indoors, you’re going to need to either take them outside or find a different indoor location where you have better reception. You might consider borrowing a laptop for testing, all three modules will work just fine when they can actually receive gps signals under an open sky.
As pointed out by YellowDog, the phone gets satellite info from the internet.
It is very unlikely that any of those GPS modules are defective. Chip antennas have poor performance and certainly cannot be expected to work indoors. If the modules must be used indoors, buy an external antenna with sufficient cable so that it can be placed outdoors, where it has a clear view of the sky.
