NAME¶

gpsctl - control the modes of a GNSS receiver

SYNOPSIS¶

gpsctl [OPTIONS] [serial-port]

gpsctl -h

gpsctl -V

DESCRIPTION¶

gpsctl can switch a dual-mode GNSS receiver between NMEA and vendor-binary modes. It can also be used to set the device baud rate. Note: Not all devices have these capabilities.

If you have only one GNSS receiver attached to your machine, and gpsd is running, it is not necessary to specify the device; gpsctl does its work through gpsd, which will locate it for you.

When gpsd is running, gpsctl may be run as any user, or as root.

When gpsd is not running, the device specification is required, and you will need to be running as root or be a member of the device’s owning group in order to have write access to the device. On many Unix variants the owning group will be named 'dialout'.

Running under sudo will cause some loss of functionality.

OPTIONS¶

The program accepts the following options:

-?, -h, --help

-b, --binary

-c RATE, --rate RATE

-D LVL, --debug LVL

-e, --echo

-f, --force

-l, --list

-n, --nmea

-r, --reset

-R, --rmshm

-s SPEED, --speed SPEED

Use the -s option with caution. On USB and Bluetooth GPSes it is also possible for serial mode setting to fail either because the serial adaptor chip does not support non-8N1 modes or because the device firmware does not properly synchronize the serial adaptor chip with the UART on the GPS chipset when the speed changes. These failures can hang your device, possibly requiring a GPS power cycle or (in extreme cases) physically disconnecting the NVRAM backup battery.

-t TYPE, --type TYPE

-T TIMEOUT, --timeout TIMEOUT

-V, --version

-x STR, --ship STR

In normal mode, through _gpsd_, the decoded string is passed through,
unchanged top _gpsd_ which in turns sends it to the receiver.  Headers,
checksums, and suffffices must be provided.

In low-level, (direct) mode *gpsctl* will provide packet headers and
trailers and checksum as appropriate for binary packet types, and
whatever checksum and trailer is required for text packet types.
(You must include the leading $ for NMEA packets.) When sending to a
UBX device, the first two bytes of the string supplied will become
the message class and type, and the remainder the payload. When
sending to a Navcom NCT or Trimble TSIP device, the first byte is
interpreted as the command ID and the rest as payload. When sending
to a Zodiac device, the first two bytes are used as a message ID of
type little-endian short, and the remainder as payload in byte pairs
interpreted as little-endian short. For all other supported binary
GPSes (notably including SiRF) the string is taken as the entire
message payload and wrapped with appropriate header, trailer and
checksum bytes.

The argument of the forcing option, -t, should be a string which is contained in exactly one of the known driver names; for a list, do gpsctl -l.

Forcing the device type behaves somewhat differently depending on whether this tool is going through the daemon or not. In high-level mode, if the device that daemon selects for you doesn’t match the driver you specified, gpsctl exits with a warning. (This may be useful in scripts.)

In low-level mode, if the device identifies as a Generic NMEA, use the selected driver instead. This will be useful if you have a GPS device of known type that is in NMEA mode and not responding to probes. (This option was originally implemented for talking to SiRFStar I chips, which don’t respond to the normal SiRF ID probe.)

If no options are given, the program will display a message identifying the GPS type of the selected device and exit.

Reset (-r) operations must stand alone; others can be combined. gpsctl will execute multiple options in this order: mode change (-b or -n) first, speed changes (-s) second, cycle rate (-c) third and control strings (-x) last.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES¶

By setting the environment variable GPSD_SHM_KEY, you can control the key value used to designate the shared-memory segment removed with the -R option. This will be useful mainly when isolating test instances of gpsd from production ones.

EXAMPLES¶

gpsctl /dev/ttyUSB0

gpsctl -f -n -s 9600 /dev/ttyUSB0

gpsctl -x '\xb5\x62\x0a\x04\x00\x00\x0e\x34'

BUGS¶

SiRF GPSes can only be identified by the success of an attempt to flip them into SiRF binary mode. Thus, the process of probing one of these running in NMEA will change its behavior.

Baud rate and mode changes work in direct mode but are not reliable in client mode. This will be fixed in a future release.

RETURN VALUES¶

0

1

SEE ALSO¶

gpsd(8), gpsdctl(1), gps(1), ubxtool(1), zerk(1)

RESOURCES¶

Project web site: <https://gpsd.io/>

COPYING¶

This file is Copyright 2013 by the GPSD project
SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-2-clause

AUTHOR¶

Eric S. Raymond