staticnv
Static Navigation Switcher
for Symbian 60 (2nd and 3rd Eds.)

I've hacked together a simple PyS60-based application for Symbian 60 cell phones to enable turning static navigation on/off. Static navigation is a feature provided by SiRFIII chips in order to mitigate their high sensitivity for car-based navigation systems. However, this makes it however useless for other types of activities like skitouring, climbing, or geocaching.

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staticnv is just a proof-of-concept implementation: I'd like to make a more user-friendly application with cleaner source-code for Symbian 60 to utilize SiRF mode of the bluetooth GPS devices. However, given my time constrains, I'm giving out this prototype version as I can't promise anything about any future version...

I was inspired by Richard Smith's Static Navigation Tool, which however rendered useless given my configuration. Namely, it was unable to switch the GPS to SiRF mode - at least my combination of HW requires much more tweaking.

License: Please note that this application is BSD-style licensed, so that you are using it entirely at your own risk! I'd be more than happy to receive and incorporate source-code-based contributions from you!

More information on SiRF protocol can be found here. If you have a PDA, you can use SirfTech to get the job done (and actually much more than just this). Other tools of interest are GPSTweak and SiRF Tweak.

Prerequisities and installation

  1. Get and install PythonForS60 (appropriate for your platform) from SourceForge.
  2. Get and install PythonScriptShell (appropriate for your platform) from SourceForge.
    This should leave you with a Python shell icon in installed apps on your cell phone.
  3. If not already created, create
    E:\Python
    on your cell phone.
  4. Copy staticnv.py to E:\Python on your cell phone.

Running staticnv

  1. Start Python shell using Python icon.
  2. Press left soft key and select "Run script" from the context menu.
  3. Select e:staticnv.py
  4. Select what you want to do.
  5. Select your bluetooth GPS device.
  6. Check the output for the results.
  7. Hit Exit soft key.

Troubleshooting and known problems

Compatibility list

staticnv has been developed and thus known to work with the following configuration:

staticnv has been reported (by others) to run successfuly with the following configurations:

staticnv may be useful even beyond 3rd edition of Symbian 60 which it has been written for. However, I advertise only those systems that have already been confirmed by at least one successful user. So feel free to experiment and report back - I will post the results here.

Changelog

  1. 2008-09-02: added support support for switching to SiRF on higher bitrates
  2. 2007-12-27: added sending 0xAA message DGPS SBAS support
  3. 2007-12-24: added preliminary DGPS support
  4. 2007-12-23: created first working version

Author

Created by Petr Holub. I'd like to thank to all of you who contributed by testing the software and reporting back (even positive reports like "it works on phone X with GPS module Y" are worth reporting).

Contributions from: Matthias Toberer.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions regarding staticnv.

Last changed 2008-08-02.
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