arduino and gps

Last update: Thu Jun 5 22:25:40 2025

I just bought on eBay a GY-NEO6MV2 NEO-6M board for less than 5 USD. Looks neat, came with a small antenna, and get easily a fix from nearby satellites ... sweet!
Originally I plan to use it as a GPS based clock, but maybe it will become more? Who knows. Anyway, this is a technical page for future reference.

Presentation

Points of interrest

Cheap!

GPS!

working fine

Points of concern

Antenna

Antenna ain't not the strongest, need to be close to a window to get the signal. Could be improved?

Time message (NMEA ZDA)

By default the standard time message NMEA ZDA is no issued (at least on my model), but there's different workarounds.

Use UBLOX custom message

Seems the UBX 04 message is a good alternate and will send me the time! To be tested. Just send $PUBX,04*37 and we're good to go.
EDit: and it works ! I got the below line:

$PUBX,04,113011.00,041017,300611.00,1969,15D,-45227909,0.000,21*73

Meaning it is now UTC 11:30:11.00 (+9h for Tokyo), on the 4th October 2017. Perfect.

Enable the ZDA

Seems you need to send some CFG-MSG to force the frequency of the ZDA message... will call this option B.

Implementation

Bill of materials

Schematics

Source code

Pictures

Links

Helpful sources

http://www.gpsinformation.org/dale/nmea.htm#ZDA

RTFM https://www.u-blox.com/sites/default/files/products/documents/u-blox6_ReceiverDescrProtSpec_%28GPS.G6-SW-10018%29_Public.pdf?utm_source=en%2Fimages%2Fdownloads%2FProduct_Docs%2Fu-blox6_ReceiverDescriptionProtocolSpec_%28GPS.G6-SW-10018%29.pdf

https://forum.u-blox.com/index.php?qa=1684&qa_1=disable-nmea-sentence see above

NMEA online decoder http://freenmea.net/decoder

TinyGPS http://arduiniana.org/libraries/TinyGPS/ (not used)

Inspiration

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