Thank you to RTL-SDR.COM reader Lee. who found a recently released program called “gypsum” which enables an RTL-SDR or HackRF to be used as a GPS Receiver when combined with a GPS antenna. Phillip Tennen, the author of Gypsum notes that Gypsum can obtain a fix within 60 seconds from a cold start and that it has no dependencies apart from numpy. We want to note that it appears that Gpysum has no live decoding ability yet, as it works from pre-recorded GNU Radio IQ files.
In the past, we’ve shown in a tutorial how GPS can be received and decoded with GNSS-SDRLIB and RTKLIB on Windows. The new Gypsum software should work on Linux and MacOS too.
What’s more, Phillip has written an incredible 4-part writeup on how Gypsum was implemented from scratch. In the write-up, Phillip introduces GPS and explains how it can even work with such weak signals that appear below the thermal noise floor. He then goes on to explain how the detected signal is decoded and turned into positional information, and how challenging it was to propagate the accurate timing information that calculating a solution requires. The write-up is presented with clear visualizations to help readers intuitively gain an understanding of the advanced concepts involved.
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