gpsprobe 1 8 Sep 2004 gpsprobe probe a GPS for type, send-cycle time and accuracy information gpsprobe -n packetcount -p device gpsprobe samples the NMEA data stream from a GPS and attempts to deduce various interesting pieces of information, including: the GPS type (what chipset it uses) the inventory of NMEA sentence types it emits its send cycle (frequency of updates) In addition, if the GPS is getting position fixes, gpsprobe generates a scattergram from them and plots a probable-error circle. This data is only meaningful if the GPS is held stationary while gpsprobe is running. The report and scattergram is generated as a gnuplot1 script to standard output. View it with gnuplot -persist <foo> where <foo> should be replaced with the name of the plot script. Note: gpsprobe needs access to the raw GPS device. Therefore gpsd must not be running when you call gpsprobe. You will probably have to run as superuser to get access to the device. The -n option sets the number of packets to sample. The default is 100. The -p option sets the name of the GPS device. The default is /dev/gps. This program handles only straight NMEA devices; it won't handle either Rockwell or SiRF binary protocols. gpsd1 libgps3 libgpsd3 gnuplot1 Eric S. Raymond esr@thyrsus.com. There is a project page here.