EM-401 GPS Engine

[EDIT]

Just wanted to update on the GPS engine. I decided to just wire up a line driver and plug it in to my serial port, open hyperterminal, power up the modual and see what happens. It immediately started spitting out beautiful NMEA serial outputs. Of course the LAT and LONG fields were all zeros for about 45 seconds, until it started acquiring sattelites. The output matched my phones GPS coordinates almost exactly.

So for anyone doing future projects and are interested, these GPS engine boards from SparkFun are pretty neat. Just turn it on and it spits out a clean serial data at 4800,n,8,1 in the form of the NMEA protocol. Have fun!!

EM-401 GPS Engine Board
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2008/12/EM-40120User20Manual.pdf

NMEA Protocol Guide
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/custompdfs/2008/12/NMEA20Reference20Manual1.pdf

SiRF Binary Protocol Guide
**broken link removed**

So it defaults to NMEA? I guess that makes more sense than defaulting to some proprietary protocal like SiRF. But like you, I got the impression it was defaulted to SiRF from the manuals.