The Trimble Nomad 800L, 800LC and 800LE ship with an embedded GPS (Global Positioning System) chip. This chip allows you to use location information for a variety of different purposes, like turn-by-turn driving directions, location-based points of interest and even tracking your travel (more on this in a later article).

However, in the past, GPS data was only able to be used by one application at a time. Obviously, this limits the usefulness of the GPS chip, since you might want to share the GPS data with an application that you’re constantly running (like a location-tracking application) and then intermittently launch an application to do location-based searches.

Thanks to a relatively new feature in Windows Mobile, you can now share your GPS information with multiple applications. This feature is not enabled by default, so you’ll need to follow some very simple steps:

1. On the Trimble Nomad, tap Start -> Settings.
2. Select the System tab.
3. Tap on the GPS icon.
4. On the first screen, labeled GPS Settings, you should see the program port. This, by default is probably listed as COM3. Make note of which port it is using because you'll need this information later.
5. Tap on the Access tab at the bottom of the screen and check the Manage GPS automatically (recommended) option (see screenshot below).
6. Launch all of your GPS applications and change the COM port to COM3 (or whatever was listed as the "program port" in step 4).

 Permitting Windows Mobile to manage your GPS signals will allow multiple programs to find your location simultaneously.

Now, Windows Mobile will automatically share the GPS signal with multiple applications at the same time. Tomorrow I'll write about some applications that make use of this information in new and interesting ways.