If I added an external antennae for the Notecarrier A GPS would it perform better?

Hardware Notecarrier F
1

Wondering if the molex would be more accurate?

2

Hi @mellerbeck,

Unfortunately it’s almost impossible to recommend one antenna over another, since there are other variables (like enclosure, physical deployment, etc) that often dictate the “best” one to use. Frankly, I’ve had great experience with the onboard GPS/GNSS antenna on the Notecarrier A.

It’s also most important to note that the Notecarrier A is unique in that it does not support use of external GPS antennas.

Thanks,
Rob

3

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Also, thanks for the note about the notecarrier A!
Can you think of any settings I can tweak to get it to more of a ‘precise location’ mode. Or make it take longer to finally decide that its location is good enough :slight_smile:
From an enclosure perspective probably nothing impeding the antenna seems logical. Have you noticed any performance differences between lying flat versus on its side?

4

Hi @mellerbeck,

The more GPS/GNSS satellites that the Notecarrier can see, the more accurate your location should be. In the response from a card.location request you should see something like this:

{'status': 'GPS updated (72 sec, 29/32 dB SNR, 4/6 sats, HDOP 1.30) {gps-active} {gps-signal} {gps-sats} {gps}', 'mode': .......}

The “sats” section is what you’d want to look at. I would caution AGAINST programmatically looking for the “sats” string, because only strings inside curly braces {} is guaranteed to not change from firmware version to firmware version.

I wouldn’t recommend using a Notecarrier A inside an enclosure, especially when it comes to GPS. The antenna needs a clear view of the sky to get a good lock and that’s pretty difficult to do inside most enclosures.

Rob

5

Hi Rob,

could you elaborate a bit more why the Carrier-A does not support external GPS antennas? In the end, the antenna is connected to the notecard and not the carrier. Why would a notecard be happy with an external (passive) antenna on the Carrier-F and not (with the same antenna) on the Carrier-A?

6

Hi @datalogger,

You’re right - a passive external antenna would work fine with the Notecarrier A (I’ll be sure to update the datasheet to make that more clear too). Thanks for pointing that out!

Rob

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