I got this receiver for hobby purposes and wound up building a small decoder using the Uno. The reception is pretty good. It will receive just fine indoors with the curtains open. If there was anything else that I might wish for it would be to add an optional external antenna.

Ran this module up on my coffee table in the lounge, and despite being inside a double brick building, got a reliable fix remarkably quickly. NMEA data is pumping out as expected, and the provided interconnect cable had me connected up to my dev board really quickly.

....just download the "TingGps" library, it will make development very easy. The little connector is impossible to solder, you'll just end up stripping the cable (which isn't easy); However the unit it's self is fantastic, accuracy to around three meters.

This thing has great accuracy. After the initial fix it could place my location on a map with pinpoint accuracy. The fix time is quick if you are under open sky. In a building it is a bit slower.

Before I purchased, I inquired if it was suitable as a replacement for the redundant EM-406 and was told it was. However information about software changes like Baud rate will be required before it will work as a change over replacement so it was not a straight forward replacement as expected. We have not completed the software changes to make it work yet so I hope I am not premature providing this requested feed back. Relevant info at the time of inquiry before my purchase would have been appreciated as I had not booked my software writer to alter code.

The best!

I've only done some rudimentary testing so far, but it seems to work fairly accurately. The GPS appears to lock onto the satellites quickly, usually within a few seconds. Sometimes longer, but it could depend on the cloud cover. I didn’t pay attention to that. I entered the reported position into Google maps. I was sitting near a perimeter wall of my house, and Google pinned a location just outside of my house, about 10 ft away based on the outline of the shown houses. I’m not sure how accurate the Google maps located the houses, but the shown location was good enough for me at the time. I had the GPS plugged into a Sparkfun CAN-BUS shield piggy backed on the Arduino Uno. I took the setup for a ride in my car having the Uno display the GPS speed on a LCD display. The GPS speed updated quickly tracking the car speed. I’m happy with the GPS unit thus far.

I had an RS232 shifter which I could use to connect it to my laptop. It output data as expected. It logged on to the satellites quickly with no need to initialize.

I wanted to preset the baud rate and output messages. I had some Java code to read and write to a port. I added a function to append the checksum to the command sentence. I could then turn off some of the output sentences but that was not persistent over a power cycle. But when I set the baud rate, it made the output sentence selection permanent as well.

So all is well.. Dave Heffler Lunenburg, N.S. Canda.

This is the first GPS module I've worked with. It works as advertised, including very fast time to fix. I'm using it as part of a clock, so in a perfect world, I would want a unit that had a 1PPS output. As far as I can tell Sparkfun sells units that have 1PPS, and units that have integral antennas, but not units that have both. Does anybody know otherwise?

The module worked as expected right out of the box. Receive sensitivity seems to be quite good, but I'm not convinced that the Time To First Fix is as good as advertised. That, combined with the absence of a 1PPS output, is my reason for a four-star rating.

We have a number of these units working well in our equipment. Very accurate and easy to integrate.

The accuracy and precision is great. GPS locks to satellite signal in just a few secs. The signal is great even indoors. ( Although you might need to take it outside for initial signal lock ). The setup was very easy and quick.

Quick negative point : GPS documentation could be better. The baud rate of the GPS is not specified on the datasheet and one has to shoot in the dark with guesses. GPS datasheet could be much much better.

When you first start it up, it takes about 15 seconds to find satellites. I had it on my window sill in a snow storm with my hand-held Garmin next to it. The Garmin gave up trying to find satellites while the EM-506 works after taking a while longer to get reception than it normally would. I don't do Arduino, so I used the code from https://github.com/kosma/minmea.

I ordered one for a little project and the module didn't transmit anything. So I ordered another one and this new module shorted out ground and VCC. So I'm very frustrated.