Hi

I recently bought a serial cable for my Etrex and now I want to use it on my linux-box. Can anyone assist em in getting this to work? I am really a newbie, please lead me trhough from the very beginnine (i.e. the serial port). I plan to use GPSMan with it.

thanks in advance

MeL

The Garmin Etrex series wll communicate with the PC via the R@-232 connection, but you'll need to make sure the unit is sending NMEA in/out rahter than the default Garmin data format. Programs like GPSDrive can use the Garmin data stream, but GPSMap uses the 'gpsd' daemon. (At least I'm pretty sure it does )

Power up your Etrex and either set it to "Demo" mode (in the options... I don't have mine in front of me at the moment) or get a good sky view and wait until you get a fix. Plug the cable into the serial port; the first serial port is /dev/ttyS0 and the second is /dev/ttyS1, etc.

Fire up gpsd and then we can test the connection with 'telnet localhost 2947'. Once you connected you can see the NMEA stream by hitting the "r" key and get your current position with the "p" key.

Once you've confirmed that it's up and running you should be able to fire up GPSMap with the default settings.

Give the above stuff a try - if it's still not working, let us know what you did and what the results were.

Cheers,
--DMc

Hi

thanks for the answer. There must have been a misunderstanding in the prgram that I wanted to use (GPSMan, not GPSMap). Nevertheless, I got it working. chmod 777 /dev/ttyS1 did the trick. I did not know that full access to the serial port was crucial.

GPSMan works perfect now and I can up-download all the data.

again thanks for your help.

MeL

You can also just create a group called 'gps', make yourself a member of that group,' chgrp /dev/ttyS1', ln -sf /dev/ttyS1 /dev/gps and then grant full access to the group.