Installing the u-blox USB drivers for Windows for use with RTKLIB can be a little tricky now that u-blox has switched their default Windows configuration from using COM port drivers to using sensor device drivers. RTKLIB does not support sensor device drivers, so it is necessary to force the driver installation process to revert to a driver that supports the COM port interface.
To make things more confusing, there are actually three different drivers that will support the COM port interface. Thrane & thrane driver. You can determine which driver you are using by opening the Windows Device Manager while the u-blox reciever is plugged into the computer. The receiver will either show up under “Ports” or under “Sensors”. If it shows up under “Sensors” then RTKLIB will not be able to see it. Here is an example of what it looks like when it shows up under “Ports”:
If it shows up under “Ports” it may be listed in one of three different ways depending on which driver is installed. They are:
USB Serial Device (COMx): This is the generic COM port Windows driver and is what u-blox recommends for Windows 10 when using the COM port interface. It will work fine with RTKLIB, but Windows has an annoying habit of automatically replacing it with the sensor driver, so I have recently stopped using this one. For direct support or to request a confidential document, which is not publicly available here, contact technical support in your region. In addition to searching for product resources, you can visit our customer portal to ask members of the customer community product‑related questions.
Here's what I see in Device Manager with my NEO-M8N USB GNSS plugged in. This is latest Windows 10. Notice how the actual device is not identified, Windows is just seeing a USB Serial Device. It's Microsoft's generic serial USB driver. It also indicates the COM port, which in this case is 16. This package contains the u-blox GPS Communication driver. The GPS driver is a program that enables the GPS hardware to communicate with the operating system. Get the latest driver Please enter your product details to view the latest driver information for your system.
USB Serial Device (COMx): This is the generic COM port Windows driver and is what u-blox recommends for Windows 10 when using the COM port interface. It will work fine with RTKLIB, but Windows has an annoying habit of automatically replacing it with the sensor driver, so I have recently stopped using this one.
u-blox Virtual COM Port (COMx): This is the driver recommended by u-blox if you want to support both the sensor interface and the COM port interface. It has some limitations though, the primary one being that you can only run one of these devices on a computer at a time, so I don’t recommend this one either.
u-blox GNSS Reciever (COMx): This is the older u-blox driver before they switched to the sensor interface. U-blox recommends this for older versions of Windows but I have started using this recently with Windows 10. So far I have found it works fine, and it does not automatically get replaced by Windows like the generic driver does. I recommend this one.
U-blox Usb Devices Driver Adapter
All three u-blox drivers are available for download from their Product Resources page. The older driver is listed as “u-blox GNSS Standard Driver for Windows”. U-blox has published a flowchart on their website to help users decide which driver to use and how to rollback to older drivers. Here is a copy of the document but it may be too small to read here and may be out of date by the time you read this so I suggest you click on this link to take you to the original document.
527 drivers total Last updated: Nov 8th 2017, 20:45 GMT RSS Feed. Latest downloads from SMSC in Network Card. Sort by: last update. SMSC LAN7500 USB 2.0 to Ethernet Adapter Driver 2.2.4.2 for Windows 7 699 downloads. Network Card SMSC. Download smsc driver.
U-blox Usb Devices Driver Win 7
To revert to the generic Windows driver with Windows 10, follow the instructions in the blue circle above. To revert to the older u-blox driver with Windows 10, you will want to first download that driver from the u-blox Product Resource page, then follow the instructions inside the blue circle.