NMEA Satellites Viewer on Amiga

 Amiga GPS/GLONASS Satellite Viewer

USB Receiver

Looking for new things to plug into my Amiga I came across a cheap USB satellite receiver on e-bay. The VK-162 is under £10 and if you go to u-blox website you can also download their u-center app to use it on your Windows machine.
VK-162

U-Blox will show all the tracking and stats info in a UI and it works with MQTT and NTRIP which is great for integration into other systems.
U-Center 25.06 world map satellite view

This isn't about the u-blox software on Windows, this is about sat receiving on the Amiga!

Amiga Receiver


Amiga's with USB devices and Poseidon stack (although others like ANAIIS may also do this) provide a USB serial device and, if you have older RS232 devices, you can use the serial port on the Amiga.

You need a serial device to receive NMEA data, and this is transmitted as text. Text means it's really easy to parse and use on our old tech, which is exactly what I did.

The development is in 2 parts with the first being an nmea.library to suck data from the serial device and arrange the data in memory for any application that wants it. The second is the application that you can see above to show some of this info.

Really the Satellite app is a demo for the nmea.library and there's more that could be built such as auto time update (an Amiga favorite, but doesn't need a battery), because satellites send the time down to receivers on the ground. 

So what can you do in it? Not too much at this point. Run the UI and set the serial device in the config menu. It will start reading NMEA data and the time will start to appear in top left. If your receiver can see the sky (indoors can be slow or difficult to get reception) then satellite icons will start to appear. These move across the sky and white trails will be shown on the map (remembers up to 20 of these, but if you don't resize or move the window it will show more).

Due to no FPU (as standard) on the Amiga it's running some integer math and the accuracy isn't so good, but interesting to watch. The nmea.library retains all the data so it can be better, but as this is a demo for people to try I've kept it simple.

There are a few minor bugs and I may iron these out over time. I expect some iterations of this and I was given some feedback at a local Amiga group meet-up, so lets see what comes next.

Getting the Software

It's all up on GitHub and Aminet. 


Aminet has 2 packages called nmealib and satellites. Satellites is packaged with the v1 nmea.library for simplicity. 

 








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