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Pretec How To Get it Up and Running

05th October 2002

Article by Dave Burrows

  

There's now been a few forum posts and emails to us regarding Pretec problems, where the manuals are corrupt and the GPS Demo's are also corrupt like we originally specified in our review, so we've created some instructions below that will help you get started in testing the GPS Receiver.

 

Firstly what you need to do is to make sure the GPS Receiver is functioning properly before you start messing around with settings in various GPS applications.

 

1. Download the GPS Demo from our downloads page.

2. Put your Pocket PC into the cradle and obtain an ActiveSync session

3. Extract the GPSDemo_4800_iPAQ.exe from the ZIP file and copy it to anywhere on the Pocket PC using the EXPLORE button in ActiveSync.

4. Now undock the Pocket PC from the cradle

5. Insert your Pretec CF GPS Receiver card into your CF Card slot.

6. Soft reset your Pocket PC

7. Now open up Explorer on the Pocket PC and browse to where you copied the GPS Demo executable.  Now click this to run it.

 

You should first be greeted with a screen like in fig 1.  This will then change to the GPS Status screen as seen in fig 2.  At first you will not see any satellites, but over a period of time whilst the Receiver is attempting to receive satellite signals, these should start to appear and then change to blue when it's actively receiving data.

 

Depending on whether the GPS Receiver is starting from cold, you may have to wait a long period, eg 5 minutes to 15 minutes to acquire the first fix, be patient.  There's no setting to select in the GPS Demo, so if something goes wrong, eg an error occurs, or you don't get any satellite signals whatsoever, you have a problem!  Once you start to acquire a fix and receive satellite locks you should start to see a picture like in fig 3 where you see satellites jotted around the circle, and also starting to acquire green fixes.

 

Looking at fig 4 once you have achieved a full lock, all of the satellite numbers and strengths down the right hand side of the screen will show green, and at the bottom of the screen you should see 3D like in fig 4.  This shows you have a proper lock in 3D mode.

 

If you now click on the POSITION button, this should then bring up the Lattitude and Longitude co-ordinates.

 

 

Fig 1

 

Fig 2

If you have managed to get this far, then your Pretec Receiver is functioning correctly and you should now be able to close the GPS Demo application, install another GPS Application and use this. 

 

Please note though that you will need to select either a PRETEC CF GPS driver in the GPS Software you go to use, or you will need to mess around with the COM ports under NMEA setting the com port rating to 4800 and test it until you find the correct Com Port.

 

TomTom Navigator does offer a Pretec driver which does work okay with the standard Pretec Compact GPS Receiver, however at the present time, the driver does not work with the LP (Low Power) edition.

 

 

Fig 3

Fig 4

Fig 5

 

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