Rand McNally GPS Hack

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If you can get your hands on a Rand McNally GPS this Rand McNally GPS Hack will show you how to get the serial data out of it. Since these GPS devices are quite old now they should be quite cheap. Does anyone know of a cheaper serial GPS solution? If so please share it with me. 🙂

“Buy a RandMcNally GPS for the Palm III from http://www.randmcnally.com The GPS circuit board is held on to the sub circuit board by a to the sub circuit board by a 5 pin header. Since I did not have a big fat solder iron tip, I held my solder iron accross all five pins, and slowly worked the boards apart slightly. When there is enough room, bend the circuit boards back and fourth untill all five pins break. Be carefull not to over stress the circuit board. If you have a better solder iron, or patience with soaking up all the solder you can easily improve this method. I then removed each individual pin that was left broken in each hole.”

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8 Comments


  1. “Does anyone know of a cheaper serial GPS solution?”
    The garmin etrex (yellow) is cheap:
    https://buy.garmin.com/shop/shop.do?cID=144&pID=6403
    Interfaces:
    Garmin
    Garmin DGPS (4800)
    NMEA (4800)
    Text out (1200, 2400, 4800, 9600)
    RTCM in (1200, 2400, 4800, 9600)
    RTCM/NMEA (4800)
    RTCM/Text (1200, 2400, 4800, 9600)


  3. I recently picked up a pile of USGlobalSat GPS units for $25 each, from their eBay outlet store. These were brand new in the box, SiRF-II chipset units, with WAAS enabled and USB adapters included. (If you omit the adapter, it’s NMEA 0183 data at TTL levels on a PS/2 style Mini-DIN connector.) They appear to have some more up right now:

    http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110185386578

    Any SiRF GPS owners should check out the SiRF Demo app, which lets you configure the output sentence structure and rate, configure input if you’re using a separate DGPS receiver, download and upload raw ephemeris data tables, and otherwise muck with the innards. http://www.sirf.com/free_demo.html



  5. That white thing on the left is the antenna?


  6. I picked up a Talon GPS today at a yard sale. It’s the Rand McNally receiver that you wrote about… I paid a single buck for it. Will make a great addition to my APRS project box.

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