
“this library is more reliable at GPS init than software serial” The SX12XX Library I even added a comment about NeoSWSerial to the HAB tracker Arduino sketch These timeouts occurred with the standard SoftwareSerial.h library but not with the NeoSWSerial.h library that you can get from here I noticed then that occasionally the reply from the GPS (containing its stored configuration settings) was being missed, there was a timeout.

I amended the program to show (on the Serial Monitor) the configuration commands being sent to the GPS and then polled the GPS to report its what should be new configuration settings. I noticed that occasionally the configuration of the GPS was failing. Some years back I wrote a high altitude balloon (HAB) tracking application and the tracker transmitter need to configure the GPS for high altitude use, the UBLOX GPSs stop working above 9,000M otherwise. To use a serial device such as a GPS on a Pro Mini then requires the use of the SoftwareSerial library. The Arduino Pro Minis for instance use the ATmega328p processor which has only one hardware serial port but that is normally reserved for downloading programs and for the Serial Monitor output.


In some circumstances you can loose characters, which is a problem when reading a GPS. Software serial is an Arduino library that you can use for serial devices such as GPSs with just 2 plain digital pins, no hardware serial port is needed.
