Quote: Originally Posted by grepzen
Connecting to the GPS Receiver is the first hurdle to overcome, but first a brief introduction. Firstly there are two GPS Standards, NMEA and SiRF.
NMEA is designed to be an easy-to-parse ASCII-based protocol. SiRF is one of several proprietary binary protocols. There's also Rockwell binary, Motorola binary, Trimble Standard Interface Protocol, etc. Most of the binary protocols allow for faster transmission and extra data, but require a bit more work to parse. See the list of vendor protocols here:
http://gpsd.berlios.de/references.html