ZOE-M8Q Flakey GPS Satellite Fix

Hello,

I have a newly purchased Qwiic ZOE-M8Q that I’m trying to make work as a position logger for my daily commutes. Its attached via qwiic to a RedBoard and I’ve loaded several of the examples from the ublox library. I’m finding it very temperamental in finding a satellite fix after a reset even when there is no change to position. I often run the sketch for hours with SIV still at zero. Other times I get up to 9 in the exact same spot. The sketches are example 3 “GetPosition” and example 5 “SpeedHeadingPrecision”

Are there any suggestions you have to make it more reliable as advertised?

Hi Tim.

What are you using for an antenna and where are you when you try to get a fix? If you’re inside a building, have you tried outside in the open away from trees and other buildings?

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the prompt reply. I’m using the "Molex Flexible GNSS Antenna - U.FL (Adhesive)

GPS-15246" antenna. I do have an update for today:

The issue seems to be when I’m in my office in front of a westerly facing window with low-E glass. When I move to the southern part of the house or outdoors. it seems to lock in a minute or two. Today I biked to work with the system in the back basket and it worked flawlessly. I’ll try again on the way home and see if it continues to run well.

Off-topic, but does anyone know what command I can use to get the current time from the board? myGPS.getUTC or something? I’ve looked in the library .h and .cpp files and didn’t see anything useful for the time.

–Tim

Hi Tim,

Our uBlox Arduino Library does not have that functionality built into it yet, but another user has posted some code for parsing NMEA sentences to get month, day, time, etc. from the ZOE-M8Q [here. Just make sure you install the appropriate libraries for that code and it should work for you to get time data from this module.

I hope this helps!](ZOE-M8Q Get UTC from Satellites? - SparkFun Electronics Forum)