bitplumber.net

So I was playing poker this evening with a friend of mine (who is also an IT professional) and he mentioned that his built in Dell EVDO card (the Verizon version) had GPS capabilities.  I was not aware of this and so I asked some additional questions, as it would be nice to have a GPS in my laptop when using Google Earth, etc…  As it turned out he has the exact same card as I do, except his is in an “E” series laptop rather than my D-630.  His card did not even have an active service account but it still worked.

Device Properties

My friends Dell Mobile Broadband Utility had an extra button that mine did not for “GPS Status”!  I was a bit miffed since I had just done a complete laptop rebuild including all the latest and greatest drivers and Dell Wireless software.  We compared all our driver and application versions and it turned out I actually had a slightly newer build number software and equivalent driver versions.

I pulled out my trusty friend google and I came across this.  I flipped the registy setting as described in the article and re-launched the Dell Mobile Broadband Utility.  Just as expected a couple of new com port drivers were installed and the GPS button appeared!

GPS Status

I have no idea why this was enabled on his, but not mine, but I am glad turning it on was so simple!  Now I need to find some good apps to make use of this.  Google Earth 5.0 seems to sort of work with it, but it does not always show me the dot of where I am (it does know where I am however as it centers the view properly).

P.S. Here are the software and driver versions I am running:

Dell Mobile Broadband Card Utility Version

-Eric