Panasonic Toughbook and Integrated GPS

[bjy20716]

Hello, we just got a Panasonic Toughbook CF-18 with integrated GPS and are trying to see if the GPS is working, are there any trial/free programs which can access the integrated GPS?
It appears to be on COM 7. The CoPilot 7 trial which came with the laptop does not seem to work.
I thought the GPS would show up in device manager since it is integrated but it is not.
I called panasonic and the guy said it won't show up in the device manager. I also tried to ask him what chipset the GPS is but he did not know what I was talking about I think.
I think we will diffiently need to know the chipset of this GPS to be able to have our programs access it.
Anyone know a utility or the chipset?

Thanks!

 

[DocDon]

I have used the ToughBook with GPS -- since no external antenna doesn't work well in the car, unless it is on the dash. But I digress, to test to see if the GPS is working you can use HyperTerminal. I don't remember all on had to go through, but it was fairly easy. With HyperTerminal you will see the NMEA signal. Check the Device Manager, there was a problem with the GPS being recognized as a serial mouse in Windows 2000. A file called "se.bat" was used to fix it. Anyway, when checking signal make sure you are outside, or at least in some open area.

 

[DocDon]

Don't know what you mean by chipset -- the signal comes in via the serial port and the software accesses the serial port, not chipset -- Any GPS software should work that is NMEA compliant, usually just have to tell it the serial port.

 

[bjy20716]

There isnt different GPS chip makers like motherboard chipset makers?