bt20 won't even work with my desktop

[drumtrucker]

it show connected in my sys tray (bt serial) but SA never finds it.

[Dan Lawyer]

This looks like a lot of garbage to start your BT-20, but stick with me.....

In SA, confirm that in the Options on the GPS tab, in the GPS Options section, "Start GPS with Program" and "Automatically detect GPS" are both unchecked.

Close SA. (Important- this only needs done for the initial connection)

Double click on the systray icon. It should open BT places. On the Com Port tab, note the 2 Com Port #'s.

Now start SA. Position the map center to your current location.
- In Options/GPS....
- set Device = Earthmate
- Now if you see the two com port numbers that you saw for the BT-20 in BT Places.....continue. If not, bail out of this and let me know.
- Set Port = the 2nd com port from your note.
- In Location click the Use Map Center
- In GPS Options, uncheck Start GPS with program (note if this was checked when you started the program, you need to Stop the GPS in the Toolbar, or on the GPS tab, and then start over)
- In When Tracking, set Recenter map on GPS
-Start the GPS, and it should start. You can click on the GPS/Status tab to see what's going on. If your seeing any satellites, then you've hooked up to it.

If it doesn't, Stop the GPS, change the com port to the first number, then start the GPS again.

This sounds like a ton of work just to start the GPS. However, then next time you start it, all you have to do is click the GPS icon in the toolbar. Everything will be set, and it will remember the com port that worked as it stores it in the registry.

[drumtrucker]

your right! this is a lot of garbage!

I only get one com port. Is this a problem?

[Dan Lawyer]

your right! this is a lot of garbage!

I only get one com port. Is this a problem?

Yes, if it's a problem if it's the wrong one. Welcome to the BT world. Where did you get one com port, in BT devices?

Ok, since I wrote all that "garbage" for nothing, lets try some professional instructions, maybe then the garbage will make sense, as they are pretty much the same steps, at least to the BT pairing with your computer. If you don't get this done you will never get it working in the DeLorme program. Also, don't blame DeLorme for this mess, that's MS's version of Plug and Play, something that has to be done the first time you use a BT device. Once it's done, you normally don't need to revisit this for that device.

Go to the DeLorme Tech Support site, and make the screen look like the first screenshot. From there, you will get a list like the second screenshot. Ignore the fact that the titles are for a BlueLogger (DeLorme's first BT GPS), it's the same process.

If you have a Toshiba laptop, then you will probably need to do the "Connecting to an Earthmate® Bluetooth GPS using Toshiba Bluetooth Drivers".
If your using Windows then the "Connecting the Earthmate® Blue Logger® GPS to a PC using the Microsoft Bluetooth Drivers" is what you should do.

Do not have SA running while you do this. It's can't see the BT com ports until the BT device is successfully paired.

Each of these links is to a tutorial that shows you how to do it. Once you have it paired properly, and have the 2 com port #'s, then you can start SA and try to do that part of the garbage above.

If something doesn't work as described, STOP and tell use exactly what you were doing and exactly what happen.

[drumtrucker]

well well well.
I only have been trying to get BT-20 to work with desktop to confirm it does in fact work. My goal is to get it to work with Palm 700p.

that said, thanks in part (or mostly) to Dan Lawyer's efforts, I finally got it to work with SA+ on my desktop, which to help confuse things, is using a Toshiba bluetooth stack and device.

The final stumbling block, not covered in Dan's help, is that after following the Delorme instructions for Toshiba device, I still only got 1 com listed, but...
after it occured to me to release my BT com port used for Hotsync of Palm 700p, SA+ works with BT-40.

I don't remember what the issue was that caused me to switch from BT-20 to LT-20, it's been so long ago now.

For my desktop (in my big truck, I don't do laptops) I will be upgrading to LT-40.

Now on to trying to get the BT-40 to work with Palm 700p (verizon). A whole different can of worms.

[drumtrucker]

what in the world???...

Well now it's working with my Palm Treo 700p!!! both with SA handheld AND WhereamI.

I followed the tuturioal for Palm devices listed in the troubleshooting help page shown by Dan Lawyer above, and even though I thought I did all that before, well anyway, now it is working.
HOORAY!

[beacon1_98]

Dan,
I have read through everything and tried it all.
To no avail....
SA does not see a GPS.

Running SA 2009 with BT-20 on a Vista laptop.
BT is enabled, BT kb and rodent work fine.

The BT-20 works fine tethered, but not via BT.
I have gone back to scratch 5 or 6 times.
I have a solid blue on the BT-20 during BT ops, at least MOST of the time. I have installed and removed from BT devices 5 times.

Vista sees the BT-20 and assigns a port of 6 outbound and 7 inbound.
I have tried both ports, no dice.
I have rebooted, restarted SA prolly 10 times, still same results.
Tried changing to Generic, 4800, 9600, the works.

Ideas?
Thx!!
Steve...

[rjmx]

I can always get my BT-20 connected to SA2009 these days, but some things need to be done in the correct order:

1. Bluetooth dongle must be plugged in and running (ie Windows does its weird "Wow! Somebody's plugged in a USB device!" sound)

2. BT-20 must be running. Not necessarily properly synced to GPS satellites, but it must be running.

3. Then, and only then, start up SA2009. If SA2009 doesn't see the BT-20, look under Options/GPS Settings/Device/Port and make sure the correct COM port shows up there. You can find the name of the correct port by right-clicking the little Bluetooth item in the system tray, clicking on "Show Bluetooth Devices", and selecting "COM Ports" on the resulting dialog box. The correct port will be the one named "Earthlink BT-20 GPS 'GPS Serial <something>'", with Direction "Outgoing". On my laptop, that's COM23 these days (it has changed in the past).

Sometimes it's not necessary to do all of these things, but these days I just do them to make sure. The basic problem is probably that the COM port doesn't exist until Windows has synced up with the BT-20, and (I would guess) SA2009 only reads the COM port list at startup. This would mean that starting SA2009 before you've synced up with the BT-20 would mean that it won't see the COM port. It would really help if the GPS Settings option dialog had a "Refresh COM Port List" button somewhere (anyone from DeLorme listening?).