I wrote the WM5 version of our application to exclusively use the GPS ID,
and I've run into several problems:
1. Customers don't know how to set it up - we're having to get involved in
helping users configure the device.
2. Some devices don't have the config icon enabled, so we have to go through
the whole 'registry editing' rigmarole to enable it.
3. Some devices don't have it on at all - the Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox
C550 being a good example.
4. Some applications don't work properly with it (Dell Navigation, for
example).
5. Customers don't like having to set it up if they're not going to use more
than one GPS app at a time.
So although it's a great idea from the developers point of view (no NMEA
parsing, share GPS data with other apps) it hasn't worked out so well in
practice. I'm now looking at adding code into our application to support a
direct serial connection as well as the GPS ID, for maximum flexibility.
Erik, show us the code you're using to analyse the NMEA strings, and we'll
see if we can see what's causing it to crash. I have code in various
languages (not c#, though) to split the various fields out of the NMEA
string once the checksum has been checked for validity, but nothing directly
relevant. As I recall it, if you know the checksum is correct, you either
have a null string (some GPS receivers output 0 for stopped, some just
output nothing) or you have a number. The speed is in knots, so you need to
translate that to something more meaningful, but that's about it.
Mike.