Incompatibility between Windows 10 and USB GPS sensors resolved

[gsdickes]

The language in the user manual about Windows 10 users having to buy a Windows 10 compatible GPS sensor puck or perform some sort of extensive workaround notwithstanding, I have had good luck with a Ublox-7 USB sensor (looks like a memory stick). The issue apparently is getting OpenCPN to recognize that a sensor is attached to a USB port and producing a position data stream.

When you try to add a connection of this type (serial) under OpenCPN's Settings/Connections menu, there is nothing in the drop down list for available Data Ports. Oops! How do you tell the program where to look? Apparently, the problem isn't really Windows 10, it's that OpenCPN cannot find the virtual ports that Windows 10 produces on its own. After about a day of trying to find a solution, I happened upon a spiffy little piece of driver software called GPSReverse. This is a driver that maps your USB sensor to a Virtual COM port that you can be recognized by legacy applications (which is to say applications that do not fully support all Windows 10 protocols). It's shareware, you can try it for free and license it for $10 if you like it. It works. You can find out more about it here: GPSComplete: GPSDirect,GPSReverse, LocationFixer GPS NMEA Windows 7 Windows 8 Windows 10 Sensor Driver iOS Android TCP Bluetooth

[rgleason]

Thanks, will put this in the new Owiki.

[H29.5Upgrade]

u-blox M8 High CPU usage with OpenCPN
Hello, I have a u-blox 8 GPS built into my laptop and have the u-blox virtual COM port running. When I connect using OpenCPN, my laptops CPU usage goes up to 35% and stays there (draining batteries very fast). The issue seems to be the way the data is gathered from the Virtual COMM port. I have tried other readers such as PuTTY and Terminal and a reader from Panasonic. PuTTY has the same issue as OpenCPN: CPU usage is 35%. Terminal and the Panasonic program use less than 1% CPU. A have tested two versions of the Virtual COMM port driver from u-blox (ver: 2.0.1.3 and ver: 3.10.0.0) the latter is worse, it's less CPU usage on OpenCPN but extremely high CPU usage on Windows Driver Foundation process... I had the same problem in January and got it fixed by a technician at Panasonic, then Windows decided it needed to update it self again... Please help if you can, Thank you, John
My PC Info:

Windown 10: version 21H1 (OS Build 19043.1081)

COM 3, u-blox Virtual COM Port (COM3)
Driver Provider: u-blox AG
Driver Date: 2/12/2013
Driver Version: 2.1.0.3

Sensor u-blox GNSS Sensor
Divice Type: Sensors
Manufacturer: u-blox
Location: Port_#0009.Hun_#0001