[aspenmayer]

> Delorme Earthmate Hyperformance GPS receiver, the RS-232 version

I have one of these, but don’t really know how useful it is or what I can do with it, but like all of my random antique hardware, I don’t really have any good reason to part with it either.

Do you have any ideas for what to do with it?

For that matter, what is a good GPS unit in modern times?

[myself248]

It's a SiRFstar chipset and speaks the SiRF binary protocol, not standard NMEA0183, so it was difficult to use it for anything else back in the day. Apparently there's a simple command to put it into NMEA mode, but I think that's not preserved across power cycles or something? It was a long time ago... I'm tempted to snag one off eBay and go on a roadtrip down memory lane.

These days, it depends on what you're doing with it, but it's hard to go wrong with this thing that claims to have a U-Blox 8-series chipset:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32816656706.html

Uniquely among such cheap receivers, that unit can even be configured to report raw data, and is thus the darling of the Galmon project for low-cost observers starting up. Also fun if you want to play with (single-band) RTK, etc.

(Dual-band has gotten "affordable", by which I mean "under a kilodollar", which is tremendous given where it was just a few years ago, but you'd probably know if you had a use for dual-band.)