Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are now in use in many applications,
ranging from GIS
to route guidance, automatic vehicle location (AVL), air, land, and marine
navigation, and
many other transportation and geographical based applications. In many
applications, the
GPS receiver is connected to some form of intelligent electronic system
which receives the
positional data from the GPS unit and then performs the required operation.
When
developing and testing GPS-based systems, one of the problems is that it
is usually necessary
to create GPS-compatible geographical data to simulate a GPS operation
in real time. This
paper provides the details of a Personal Computer (PC)-based GPS simulator
system called
GPSIM. The system receives user way-points and routes from Windows-based
screen forms
and then simulates a GPS operation in real time by generating most of the
commonly used
GPS sentences. The user-specified waypoints are divided into a number of
small segments,
each segment specifying a small distance in the direction of the original
waypoint. The GPS
sentence corresponding to the geographical coordinates of each segment
is then sent out of
the PC serial port. The system described is an invaluable testing tool
for GPS-based system
developers and also for people training to learn to use GPS-based products.