Touch Pro and Touch Pro 2 GPS polling tweaks

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Originally Posted by BooDaddy

You are just outright wrong on this one my friend. The "virtual port" you are referring to is under the registry entry:
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\GPS Intermediate Driver\Multiplexer

You need to read up on the WinMo intermediate driver and how it works. First its 2 fold. It firstly creates a simple interface for developers to talk to the GPS chipset through windows. Sure, you can talk to the GPS chipset directly with its hardware port or address, but that ties it up to only one application. Thats why everyone uses the Windows API.
Secondly, it creates the multiplexer that simply forwards the NMEA data to a virtual com port...in most instances its com4.

When we change the polling interval under the key HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\GPS Intermediate Driver\GPSOneDevice we are actually changing how many times the WinMo gps API actually queries the GPS chip. In that same key, you can see where the port is set to GPS0, which if I am not mistaken is the actual hardware address port for the GPS chip.

What you are referring to is another part....in the mulitplexer. WinMo 5 was the first to have this multiplexer so that more than one app could access the gps data at the same time. It isnt very good, but for legacy apps that needed to access the gps through a direct COM, it worked. I dont know of any developer worth his salt would code an app to talk to the gps this way now.

GPSGate talks to the WinMo gps API the same way 99% of all other apps nowadays does.... so its a waste of a program.

You need to jump on over to MSDN and readup on how it works. Better yet, grab the SDK and play with it.

Now, I will say this, I can see where increasing the polling rate could decrease battery life, as we are essentially increasing how many times windows calls the gps hardware in a given time frame (in the case of my cab, its 10 times per second).

With this, I am done arguing with you. It would be nice if someone more fluent in C++ or C# than us would chime in. The SDKs for both Winmo 5 and Winmo 6 are free. If I am wrong on this one, I am not ashamed to admit it, but I will need someone to show me where I am wrong.

The regisrty setting is dormant IMHO (like 100's of others in WM). It's effecting nothing.

If setting polling rate to 10 seconds testing GoogleMaps (on Windows Managed), iGuadance on GPSGate or iGuidance on COM4 (Virtual COM Port) all still update around 1 a second I'm convinced it does nothing.

I live and breath C# every day.

It seems consistent with what most have found that it made no freaken difference.

It seems consistent also with your poll that a majority of people have no issue at all with the GPS in the first place.