Hi guys
I have a phone, which can lock onto a lot of satellites. In a test, I was able to lock onto 46 satellites, which gave me incredible gps accuracy.
So, is there any way in which I can use the phone GPS with my Pixhawk, so the Pixhawk uses the phone gps as the primary navigation gps?
The phone is an android phone.
Thank you!
If you are able to program the phone to send periodical a Ardupilot compatible GPS data stream (for example NMEA data with 5 Hz period) it is possible to use such data.
But the total number of satellites is not a indicator for a good accuracy. All satellites belong to different satellite systems as GPS, Galileo, Glonass, Beidu ..)
Always only the satellites of one system are used to for position calculation. So all the satellites of the not used system at that time are unimportant. Some times it is better to only use by default only one or maximum two systems so that all free receiver channel can look for more or better satellites of this system. If we are looking only for GPS signals the mobile phones also use the same GPS chips as the stand alone GPS modules.
But if you want to use your phone than also you can go the other way round. The phone also have one or more IMUs; a magnetometer, sometimes a barometer, different kind of integrated wireless connectivity. So why don’t you use the phone instead of the pixhawk. 
My phone gets hdop of around 0.4, which is far better than what I get on drone gps.
It has an icm4xxxx imu and a magnetometer.
It would be great if I could somehow use the camera for something like an optical flow and the gps for navigation. Maybe it’s possible to use the imu and magnetometer, but I think the latency would make things worse than better.
I think it is possible to connect the phone via usb, and then use some software to communicate via MAVLink protocol.
Also, what does the “GPS-Inject” do in mission planner? Is it related?
I don’t have much experience with companion computer setups, so some guide would be great.
And thank you @Juergen-Fahlbusch for the quick response.
Hi @Ishitbh,
experimentation is always interesting but in practice I think it’s very unlikely that the GPS on a phone is as good as a decent quality drone GPS (e.g. a UBloxF9P). I think the accuracy will look good on a phone because it will be highly filtered so it won’t appear to move around much.
My opinion is just based mostly on the antenna size of the GPS on a drone vs in a phone. I think that’s all that is really different about the two.
Thank you @rmackay9
Actually, I only have a cheap, low-quality gps - the Ublox m8n.
I agree that the phone data would be filtered, but I would still like to give it a try , and maybe get more accuracy in loiter, without spending any money.
So, is it possible to do this or the only way is to buy a better gps reciever?