BlueNext BN-909GR & SirfStar III Chip

I have been playing around with a BlueNext BN-909GR which has the SirfStar III GPS chip. The chip and implementation by BlueNext was amazing. I was able to get a lock of up 10 satellites on a clear bright day when the receiver was placed indoors! I was going around the house and it kept a lock on at least 1 satellite 90% of the time and it switched to DGPS when it didn’t.

When it was sitting next to me on the computer about 1.5 – 2 meters away from a glass window it had 9 satellites locked. I clenched my hand around the unit and it dropped to 5 satellites. It was impressive. Usually on a cold start it took around 1 – 2 minute to get a lock but normally it will get one faster. This was without the Assisted GPS (AGPS) aid although the chip does support it. I think the chip gets a better signal than my aging TomTom Go700.

The SirfStar III uses the NEMA 0183 standard which is the format for the GPS data from the unit. It is a string containing a series of data separated by commas. Each data is in a certain order and different standard have different data and in different order. This has posed many issues with JavaME which I will discuss in another post.

I got the BlueNext BN-909GR to try and create a J2ME midlet (application) which would use a bluetooth and a GPS device.

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Hardware, Java, Mobile Phone, Programming, Review. Bookmark the permalink.

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