Is this GPGSV sentence valid? - gps

Question

While parsing the NMEA output of a GPS receiver I get the following lines:
$GPGSV,4,1,16,02,17,228,35,03,04,048,37,05,59,285,29,06,02,030,34*73
$GPGSV,4,2,16,07,58,061,46,08,80,159,40,09,11,227,32,10,51,167,47*77
$GPGSV,4,3,16,13,15,089,38,15,00,279,,16,00,018,,26,34,279,42*7A
$GPGSV,4,4,16,28,20,154,39*4C
As I understand it, from various sources on the web (e.g. here), this is wrong. According to the 3rd number, there should be 16 satellites, which was true for all those GPS receivers I previously encountered, but the sentence from this one only contains the data for 13 satellites.
Is this an error? Or do I read the specification wrongly?

Answer 1

Nmea is a weakly specified file format. GPS chip manufactures provide documenttaion how they interpret the NMEA specification.
For example ublox and Sirf each have a chapter of about 40 pages describing how to interpret the NMEA format.
So if you write " Or do I read the specification wrongly?", then the question is which specification you are reading. That of the GPS chip manufacturer? The NMEA 0183 spec does not contain enough info to correctly parse the sentences.
Especially in your case: the NMEA protocol does not desribe how to handle empty values vs invalid ones.
In your case the receiver theretically expects to see 16 satellites, but found only 13.
I would expect that the missing 3 sats would have empty ",,,,,,,,". But obviously the manufacturer decided to just stop and append the checksum string. (Its simply not speciefied that it is mandatory to print out empty semicolons for the missing 3 sats.
Unfortunaetly you have to expect to write a NMEA parser for each CHPS chip manufacturer.
Therfore I always recommend to use the binary format of the Chip manufactureres protocol. (e,.g uBlox bianry or Sirf binary because these are exactly specified).
You can further look at the docu for GpsBable: they show how different manufacturres produce different GSV data sets.
Update:
As you now told that it is a ublox receiver:
The answer is, yes the NMEA sentences are valid. Look at the ublox protocol spec. i use spec for ublox 5:
On page where the GSV sentence is described look at the "Message Structure":
{,sv,elv,az,cno}*cs
the curly braces enclose the sequence that is repeated.
And below look at "1..4": this means 1,2,3 or 4 blocks. There is not written "4", its "1..4" therefore satelite info is optional, and has not to be empty.
If you further look at the example ublox gives, then you see, that the last GPGSV message contains less than 4 satellites, exactly as you are showing in your question.

Answer 2

Yes, it's inconsistent; the last message should have described more than one satellite (four, actually) so as to total the 16 advertised. The GPS receiver should have reported at least the satellite IDs (PRN), even if their viewing direction in the sky and SNR were unknown at the time, e.g.: {,01,,,}.
That being said, it's better to write programs tolerant against ill-formed messages; in this case, updating the number of satellites in view to 13, as counted.
(I've checked the checksums and they're okay.)