VK-162 G-Mouse USB GPS Dongle Navigation Module External GPS Antenna Remote Mount USB GPS Receiver for Raspberry Pi Support Google Earth Window Linux Geekstory

Works great for my raspberry pi5

Plugged it in and as soon as I was able to open my Serial Monitor it was already spitting out NMEA sentences. Next, its port was recognized by my BktTimeSync program and sync'd the laptop clock. I installed the u-center program, selected the port and it was off and running. After a couple minutes there were 10-12 satellites recognized and HDOP was below 1.0, a good sign. Very happy and no complaints.

Worked great. Used with pynmea library with custom py script on a macos. Streams NMEA sentences just fine.

Garbage.You have to install two different pieces of software and an Authenticator on your phone to make this “work”.Avoid at all costs. It wants you to accept programs and cookies and more and more. Also you have to go to google to find the website. Good luck.

If you want this for a time reference for a raspberry pi just know it works but you have to write the code yourself. It won’t work with Bookworm NTP and gpsd can’t be running because it hogs the serial port this thing appears on (/dev/ttyACM0).It’s got a USB connector, magnetic base and enclosure of sorts, which features all make it useful where it has to be out in an environment rather than inside some other box - like away from the pi and over by a window. The cord is pretty long but I have not tried it with a usb extension cable, other units work with them so this should too but I haven’t proven that.It does not support PPS timing so it can’t be used for Network Time Protocol a server with Debian Bookworm (which stupidly requires pps). This is the fault of the children who wrote Bookworm, not of this unit.PPS devices on pi’s require the use of gpio pins and that means long wire lengths to place the gps over to spot with a good signal. Long wires are vulnerable to induced voltages from lightning strikes blocks away and the gpio pins on rpi’s are completely unprotected MOS devices. Long gpio wires are a very good way to lose a pi and man when they go they dead short internally - I’ve had two pi’s short from lightning EM pulses in the neighborhood and draw over 1a@5v becoming hotter and hotter and hotter, easily becoming a fire risk.Anyway, gpsd recognized the unit (but REQUIRED a reboot which is when gpsd seems to search for new units) and the two gps status programs for Linux that I know about both worked: gpsmon and cgps. I prefer the latter because it’s faster, cleaner looking when started with the -s flag and more detailed concerning satellite info and signal info. These programs use curses to show the signal strengths, satellite id’s and a lot of other data on a simple console login or xterm window.I have not tried this thing on any OS besides Bookworm on pi02’s and pi4’s.So, on a machine WITHOUT gpsd, in a couple hours, I wrote a tty reader and nmea parser to extract the time/date info from gprmc messages, convert it for the local time zone plus daylight savings time setting and then apply the result to the linux system on boot using the date command. With comments and debug statements it’s about 200 lines of code.Once gpsd is installed it makes the usb/acm tty port unusable by anything else. I really, really hate systemd and the people who wrote it.

I don't have any problems with this. I use it for the software for tracking weather balloons and their landing. It's very accurate and I've been able to pinpoint weather balloon landing locations by driving almost right to the location it landed at. I can see me on a map to match the weather balloon location is how this tool comes to use. I could also use it with my astronomy equipment but I don't know how. As I can tell it will also be good for that too. I didn't install drivers and I use Windows 11 on a laptop. It may have installed the drivers for me when I plugged it in. It sticks to the roof of my car, but I use it on my dash. It won't stick to anything there, so I got a little clamp to hold wires and used it to hold the GPS pug to the dash. GPS lock seems to be instant. I've never noticed a delay.

I would very much like to thank Oscar for his review.My primary goal was to build a time server on a stand-alone local area network and learn how a time server works in Linux. I learned how to sync my router, RPis, and Windows machines to a Linux time server.The VK-162 acquired a signal very fast. I used some hand-held GPS units about 15 years ago and it took about 3 minutes to acquire a signal.There is a Raspberry Pi GPS application that displays satellites, lat, lon, and time. I got the simple GPS application going first to verify everything was working. Then, I got my time server going.There is plenty of easily accessible info on the internet and in the Raspberry Pi forums on USB GPS dongles.I am pleased with my purchase and I am please with the price and fast shipping from Geekstory. I had no problem getting the Raspberry Pi GPS application to work and no problem getting the Raspberry Pi Zero W time server working.