GPS operation nRF9160

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

MJD093 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 14:08:16 GMT

Carl Richard Thanks for verifying! 🙂

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

Carl Richard — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 14:04:27 GMT

You were entirely right MJD093! I also got it confirmed from when checking with a Nordic employee; V0.8.3 is V0.8.2 with minor changes.

SergioT, could you mark MJD093's answer as the solution if it was sufficient?

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

MJD093 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:50:33 GMT

Sergio, no connector will fit the Murata RF switch connector except their own one. You need the MXHS83QE3000 cable or you can buy the connector end separately and wire stuff to it. I know this because I actually called Murata about this before I swapped my 0.7.0 board for a 0.8.5 board. These are the connections the operator recommended for thier connector.

"Thank you for your phone call yesterday.

MM8130-2600 is our SWF connector type and you can see the recommended probe information as shown below:

https://www.murata.com/en-eu/products/productdetail?partno=MM8130-2600 MM8130-2600 Connector

https://www.murata.com/en-eu/products/en-gb/products/productdata/8796821389342/SWN1PR1.pdf?1437968896000 Manual Probe MXHS83QE3000"

EDIT:

Sorry, forgot the other ones were images in the email:

MM126320

MM126056

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

SergioT — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:46:36 GMT

Our connector doesn't match, so we will need to check it some other day. It will can take a while until we can test...

But thanks for the information. I'll keep on following the development because our own board design is almost ready for prototyping: then we will see if it works or not.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

MJD093 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:30:42 GMT

Please see Bjorn's reply in this question, you need that cable, an external antenna and a Bias Tee circuit.

devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../187462

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

SergioT — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:29:56 GMT

We have a 50 ohm GPS antenna that we developed for another project: We will try it out and you the result.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

MJD093 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:28:16 GMT

It will, any external connector, such as the molex 206640 (which I use on the v0.8.5 DK cause my on-board one flicked off) don't need a matching circuit as they are designed to work off-board. They just need a 50ohm line.

If your board is basically a v0.8.2 GPS board. You have two options really, get a new DK that is of the latest hardware design or buy the murata cable that can connect to that connector and then connect an external antenna that can use the screw antenna connector thing. (seeMurata part no. MXHS83QE3000)

There is a blog post about this somewhere.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

SergioT — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:24:08 GMT

From I see in the schematic, the connector is already after the matching, so it will not help.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

SergioT — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:15:55 GMT

There is a Murata connector called J6! I checked against 0.8.5 and it is really different.

Can I connect there an external antenna ? If the matching is wrong then it might help...

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

MJD093 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:15:21 GMT

Quicker to tell if you see J6 on the antenna line. That would be the bad antenna circuit 🙂

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

Carl Richard — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:13:31 GMT

I have access to both 0.8.3 and 0.8.5. Will do a quick GPS test on the 0.8.3 now to check.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

MJD093 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:09:57 GMT

Ok so the pca10090 is operating as expected. The device has been up and scanning for satellites for the past 265 seconds but it can't seem to lock on to any.

As Carl stated, the DK 0.8.2 and earlier have a mis-matched antenna circuit on the GPS antenna. Now I have never seen any information on the v0.8.3 boards (didn't know there was one). That being said, the DK manual history has only been updated for v0.8.2 and v0.8.5, I could imagine that v0.8.3 is of similar design of v0.8.2.

Could you please check your antenna circuit on the DK and compare it to v0.8.5 (see the DK datasheet, under hardware) and see if they match in the components you see. One big red flag would be the existance of a Murata RF connector (J6) on your antenna circuit. If that is on your circuit, theres a good chance your DK will not be able to use GPS without an external GPS antenna.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

SergioT — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:02:34 GMT

The example compiles and operates as expected. I just added to prj.conf the necessary lines to enable RTT in SES so that I can ee the result of the printk. I added:

CONFIG_PRINTK=y
CONFIG_UART_CONSOLE=n
CONFIG_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_RTT_CONSOLE=y
CONFIG_HAS_SEGGER_RTT=y
CONFIG_USE_SEGGER_RTT=y

Now I can see on the Debug window:

Tracking: 0 Using: 0 Unhealthy:0
Seconds since last fix 265

Scanning [-]

The number increments every second.

I would expect ot get GPS data after some time, but nothing.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

SergioT — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:57:01 GMT

The answer is above: version 0.8.3

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

MJD093 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:56:28 GMT

Can you also give us some more information on why the GPS example isn't working. Can you post the serial port log from the example or the build error if that is what you are experiencing.

RE: GPS operation nRF9160

Carl Richard — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 12:42:09 GMT

Hello Sergio!

First: which version of the DK are you using? From what I've heard boards including and preceding 0.8.2 have issues with the GPS hardware.

Best regards,
Carl Richard