U-Blox Evaluation Kit

For the experimental purposes was used the U-Blox M8N evaluation kit. This kit can be directly connected with a PDA or a laptop. U-Blox M8N EVK is compact and user friendly, thus it is appropriate for users with no experience. Furthermore, there is no need for external power supply because the built-in USB interface provides both power supply and high-speed data transfer. Moreover, the kit has an internal battery so as to store the initial configuration settings. In the internal memory is stored also the orbital information of the satellites between each use, this yields a faster start-up.
The installed software on the laptop that was used for recording the data is the u-center GNSS evaluation software (v8.22), which is provided by the manufacturer of the receiver. This software can be used also for configuration, testing, visualization and data analysis of the GNSS receiver.
That specific evaluation kit could not track Galileo satellites with the firmware (v2.01) that was installed on it. Due to this fact, a firmware update was made (v3.01) to solve this problem. According to the architecture of the receiver, it cannot record simultaneously measurements from GLONASS and Beidou, but only from one of those two constellations. Finally GLONASS was chosen additionally with GPS because of its satellite availability over Europe.

Each kit includes:

• Compact 105 x 64 x 26 mm EVK‑M8N unit
• USB cable
• EVK‑M8N: Active GPS / GLONASS / BeiDou antenna
• Quick Start reference card

It is important to be mentioned that the receiver should should be set to record the raw messages. Otherwise, further process of the data would be impossible. This procedure was done using the u‑center evaluation software.