Android Phone as Bluetooth GPS with OpenCPN

[RhythmDoctor]

For those who run OpenCPN on a laptop with no internal GPS, there are many choices for USB/serial pucks and Bluetooth GPS transmitters, including those made by Globalsat. But before you go out and buy something, you may have something right in your smartphone (if it has a GPS chip in it).

On Android, there are numerous apps in Play Store that will transmit your phone's GPS stream on Bluetooth. The first one I tried (trial version of a "commercial" product) didn't work too well. But the second one, a free app in beta, works perfectly for me.

At the very least, you can use the phone to test your laptop's ability to connect via Bluetooth before committing money to buy a dedicated device. Testing this is important, because of the many problems people have had making Bluetooth connections in Windows.

I suspect there are similar apps available over on iTunes, but I am less familiar with that end of things.

[stow]

GPS data transmitted by Android application mentioned above (GPS over BT) are not read properly on my Windows Vista. I used XPort to detect GPS, also OCPN serial ports & NMEA debug window. I used succesfully Android applications ExtGPS and ShareGPS to retransmit GPS data