I sent a support email about this, but then immediately received a reply that it might take 48 hours to get a response, so I thought I'd try the forum.

This thing seems to be entirely broken. The lights indicate that it is working, but of the three ways that I am supposed to be able to get data out of it, none of them work.

Bluetooth: The device always refuses connections, as if I were using the wrong passcode. The manual says to use "0000", and my other bluetooth GPS connects to my computer just fine, but this one refuses connections. I can ping it, so it's bluetooth is working, it just won't accept connections. I started a thread about it in the Gentoo forums ( http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-773063.html ), but I fully expect it to get nowhere. Linux being Linux, it's impossible to know if the GPS doesn't work or if it's just Linux. (I'm rather surprised any time a company dares to claim to support Linux.) I don't have a windows computer with bluetooth to test it with.

USB: Both Linux and Windows (on seperate computers) get stuck in a loop trying to enumerate it. Windows keeps popping up a message saying "a usb device has malfunctioned." I tried another USB cable in addition to the poorly manufactured one which came with it, which despite the USB logo, appears not to be a USB cable at all, but mearly a power cable. I later tried yet another USB cable, at which point Windows appeared to just ignore it.

SD Card: I think the card may work, and it's just the micro-sd to SD converter which is broken. The GPS itself doesn't have a problem with the card, but when read from the computer, only corrupt data comes out, and writes fail to actually write anything. Looking at a hexdump of the data, it almost appears to be valid, except that all of the bytes are logically ORed with 0x22, and given that SD cards communicate over a 4 bit bus, this makes me think the card converter is just broken. I also tried using the card in my digital camera (with the converter) but my camera didn't like it either, declaring that it wasn't formatted and then failing to format it. I don't have anything that accepts micro-sd cards without the converter.

Aside from all of that, it does seem to work. The lights work as the manual indicates they should. I just can't get any data out of it.

So is it broken, or is there something I can do to make it work? I thought about removing the battery in an effort to reset it, but while I've seen devices where a metal panel with screws is intended to be removed by the user, I don't know that this is one of those devices, and I don't want there to be any excuses for not accepting a return.

After wedging some paper in the SD card adapter, in an effort to cause the pins to make better contact, I can now read the SD card, and it is indeed working just fine, so apparently it's just that the micro-sd adapter is poorly made. (It also has no detent on the write-protect switch, so that it freely moves from one position to the other all by itself.)

Still no progress on USB and Bluetooth.

Hi, Columbus V-900 logged data could only be retrieved by reading the contents of the microSD card via a card reader (not USB and not Bluetooth).

Linux support was mentioned in the context of the Time album application (written in Java) and you could process / geotag pictures by reading the contents of the logged data using a card reader.

USB - strictly for charging only and cannot be used for GPS data / transmitting logged data.

In regards to your pairing issues, I suggest you delete all pairings from your Linux Bluetooth manager, then re-attemp to pair. If nothing works, please reboot Linux PC, power cycle V-900, and re-test.

Please let us know your test result.

I knew that the sd card couldn't be read via USB, but something had given me the impression that the real-time tracking information could. I don't know what. I looked over the web site and the manual, and neither say anything of the sort. In fact the USB connector is always referred to as a power connector. Perhaps I read it on some random review site.

In the process of deleting the other pairings I noticed that in one of the umpteen ways Linux has to specify a pin code, I had specified the bluetooth mac address of the other GPS I have. So I changed it to the address of the new one, and now it works just fine, even with the other pairings, which means that my old GPS only worked because it didn't require a pin code, whereas this one does and Linux just wasn't giving it to it, despite the fact that I correctly entered the pin code in many other ways. Apparently it's only that one way which works. I guess it just wouldn't be Linux if it didn't take six hours to do something that anyone else can do in 30 seconds.

Anyway, thanks for your help, and just in case someone else has this problem, here's where I stuck the pin code:
(In Gentoo at least. Different distributions may well do things differently.)

In file /var/lib/bluetooth/00:00:00:00:00:00/pincodes
(That mac address needs to be the address of your computer's bluetooth adapter, but it should also be the only mac-address directory there.)

Put a line like this:
11:22:33:44:55:66 0000
(That mac address has to be the mac address of the GPS unit.)

You can find the mac address for your GPS like this:
(Once you've properly set up bluetooth, that is, but there's stuff all over the internet about how to do that. It's just the pin codes which seem to be so poorly undocumented.)

root@computer:~# hcitool scan
Scanning ...
11:22:33:44:55:66 Columbus GPS

...but Linux being Linux, this information will be out of date in six months, and someone else will have to figure it out all over again.

 Thanks for confirming.