As said in an old article, atomic clock devices are expensive peices of equipment mainly confined to national laboratories. However, there are a number of atomic clock references available free to air for computer time synchronisation.

The GPS satellite system has on-board atomic clock units that can be received and utilised to synchronise computers and computer networks. The GPS atomic clock system is available world-wide. Any GPS antenna with a good view of the sky can synchronise with the GPS satellite system.


To use the Bluetooth GPS antenna with Windows Vista we will need the following items:

  1. A bluetooth GPS antenna: naturally
  2. A serial terminal or a program able to read data from a serial port.

That's all you don't need anymore.

We will use my Haicom HI-408BT bluetooth GPS antenna, and as terminal we will use Tera Term a freely downloadable terminal software for Windows Vista.

 

                          http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html

 

 

All the functionalities that are needed to attach to the bluetooth antenna are already included in Windows Vista, we only need to activate them.


First of all, we must turn on the Haicom HI-408BT, the in Windows we must open the Control Panel and then the Bluetooth Device item, You should see something like the following picture:

Click on "Add New Devices" and wait a while, the GPS device should appear:

 

Now select the device and go on.

Choose to link without password and go on.

Windows will install the needed drivers………

Close the window.

Now on the "Bluetooth Devices" window double click on the GPS device, then click on the services tab. You should see something like the following picture:

As you can see you will have a new serial port. Close all the opened windows and start Tera Term.

Select the "Serial" radio button and then select the COM corresponding to your device, last click on the OK button.

 

If all is working fine, on your Tera Term window you should see NMEA sentences (one each second).

If Windows asks for a code, to access the Bluetooth device, insert four zeros "0000".

Tha's all,

Gg1.