Counterfeit M8N modules

I had a few  comments recently on counterfeit u-blox M8N modules so I thought I would take a closer look at some of my receivers to see if I could spot any fakes.

Here is a photo of the module label for a unit from CSG, the most expensive M8N receiver I have and based on their reputation, the one I have the most faith that it is genuine.

 

Here are photos from two of my other receivers.  The on on top is from a GYGPSV5-NEO I got from ebay.  As far as I can tell this one is genuine as well since the label looks very similar.  Performance-wise, it is also indistinguishable from the CSG unit.

The photo on the bottom is a from a very inexpensive M8N based receiver I bought recently on ebay but have not used.  They didn’t even try very hard to make it look real!  The font is different, the QR code is different, the copyright symbol is a completely different size.    I don’t think there is any question that this is a fake.  I have not used this module so I don’t know how well it performs compared to the genuine modules.  It’s possible it works just as well, I don’t know.  I also didn’t take off the module cover and look inside but I would assume it has a real ublox M8030 chip inside.  Apparently some of the fake units cut corners on some of the other components inside such as the size of the flash.  Here’s a photo of the unopened unit.

 

I did open up one of my GYGPSV5-NEO receivers that I had accidentally damaged by using 5 volts on the UART lines instead of 3.3 volts.  This is what it looked like, in case anybody is curious.

 

On another note, I have just updated the demo5 executables on my website.  The new code is merged up to RTKLIB 2.4.3 b26 and now matches what I have on my Github page.  It includes the changes I described in my last post as well as a change for post-processing “combined mode” that I will describe in a future post.