gpsdecode113 Jul 2005gpsdecodedecode RTCM or AIVDM streams into a readable formatgpsdecode-d-e-l-u-D debuglevel-VDESCRIPTIONThis tool is a decoder/encoder for various binary packet formats
associated with GPS and differential-correction services. It produces
a text dump on standard output from binary on standard input, or
binary packets on standard output from text on standard input, and
aims to be 100% information-preserving in both directions. As well as
data, the decoder also prints decoder status messages to standard
error as necessary.Two of the supported formats are RTCM 2 and 3, a pair of obscure
and complicated serial protocol used for broadcasting pseudorange
corrections from differential-GPS reference stations. You can use this
mode of the tool with
nc1
to examine RTCM feeds from DGPSIP servers or Ntrip broadcasters. The
decoder dump format for RTCM2 is described in
rtcm5;
these lines go to standard output.Another supported format is AIVDM. This is the sentence format
used by the marine Automatic Identification System. This can be
decoded, but not yet encoded. The dump lines are values of AIS payload fields,
comma-separated, in the order that they occur in the payload, spare
and assigned-mode bits omitted. Spans of fields expressing a date are
emitted as an ISO8601 timestamp (look for colons and the trailing Z
indicating Zulu/UTC time), and the 19-bit group of TDMA status fields
found at the end of message types 1-4 are are dumped as a single
unsigned integer in hex. (Unused regional-authority fields are also
dumped in hex.)By default, certain scaling and conversion operations are
performed for the output. Latitudes and longitudes are scaled to
decimal degrees rather than the native AIS unit of 1/10000th of a
minute of arc. Ship (but not air) speeds are scaled to knots rather
than tenth-of-knot unit. Navigation status and positioning-system
type are dumped as text strings rather than IAS numeric codes. Rate of
turn may appear as "nan" if is unavailable, of as one of the strings
"fastright" or "fastleft" if it is out of the IAS encoding range;
otherwise it is quadratically mapped back to the turn sensor number in
degrees per minute. Vessel draughts are converted to decimal meters
rather than native AIS decimeters.OPTIONSThe option tells the program to decode
packets presented on standard input to a text dump on standard
output. This is the default behavior.RTCM2 will be dumped in the format of
rtcm-1045
on standard output. The option option tells the program to
encode a text dump in the format of
rtcm-1045
to standard output. Encoding is supported only RTCM2, not for
RTCM3.The suppresses scaling to float quantities
and text expansion of numeric codes. A dump with this option is
lossless.The inserts a mnemonic label, followed by
an equal sign, before each field in each dump line.The option directs the program to emit its
version number, then exit.The option sets a debug verbosity level. It is
mainly of interest to developers.APPLICABLE STANDARDSThe applicable standard for V2 is RTCM Recommended
Standards for Differential NAVSTAR GPS Service RTCM Paper
194-93/SC 104-STD.Note that gpsdecode presently
recognizes only the 2.1 level of RTCM; the protocol was revised up to
a version 2.3 including additional messages relating to GLONASS and
real-time kinematics before being deprecated in favor of V3. It is
now obsolete.The applicable standard for V3 is RTCM Standard
10403.1 for Differential GNSS Services - Version 3 RTCM
Paper 177-2006-SC104-STD.Ordering instructions for the RTCM standards are accessible from
the website of the Radio Technical
Commission for Maritime Services under "Publications".The applicable standard for AIVDM is ITU-R M.1371:
ITU Recommendation on the Technical Characteristics for a Universal
Shipborne Automatic Identification System (AIS) using Time Division
Multiple Access in the Maritime Mobile Band,. A more
accessible description can be found onn the references page of the
GPSD project website.BUGS AND LIMITATIONSAIDVM decoding presently only parses fields for the common
sentence types 1-5, the rarely encountered type 9, and the uncommon
type 18. AIVDM encoding is not yet supported.RTCM3 decoding is buggy and incomplete.RTCM2 represents floating-point quantities as an integer
multiple of a fixed scale factor. Editing an RTCM2 dump can produce
numbers that are not an integer multiple of the scale factor for their
field. If you do this, the value actually packed into binary RTCM2
will be rounded down to the nearest scale unit, and dumping will show
slightly different numbers than those you entered. This bug could be
fixed by supporting the option to suppress
scaling, but the protocol is noew obsolete.The RTCM2 decoder logic is sufficiently convoluted to confuse some
compiler optimizers, notably in GCC 3.x at -O2, into generating bad
code.SEE ALSOgpsd8,
gps1,
libgps3,
libgpsd3,
gpsprof1,
gpsfake1,
rtcm-1045.
AUTHOREric S. Raymond esr@thyrsus.com. This is a
somewhat hacked version of an RTCM decoder originally written by
Wolfgang Rupprecht. There is a project page for
gpsdhere.