Use a Medion MD40600 PDA with a Garmin GPS

How to use a Medion MD40600 PDA with a Garmin GPS receiver

or any other GPS receiver with serial port and NMEA 2 protocol.

This information may also be valid for the following PDA's (which apparently use the same connector and have the same pinout, do your own research however, I cannot be held responsible for burning out your unit):

  1. Viewsonic V35

  2. Yakumo Delta

  3. Mitac Mio 338/528

  4. Packard Bell 2030

  5. NEC E200

Problem: You may (as I did) want to use your Medion MD40600 PDA (Aldi navigation set) with a GPS receiver other than the standard supplied one.

Why: the standard GPS receiver and power supply cable are mounted in my wife's car, a Garmin GPS12XL is mounted in my own car. I use it normally with a laptop computer and various mapping software, but want to be able to use the PDA every once in a while in this car.

Solution: you may want to purchase a ready made cable, for instance from Medion or at: http://www.pc-mobile.net/. However, if you're not affraid of some soldering exercises there may be a more economic solution. First of all obtain a so called PDA 3in1 set (for Yakumo/Aldi/Medion/Tchibo) as often offered in eBay. I obtained mine from eBay seller Eurofuxx (C & J Direct GmbH, website www.xpda.de) at a total cost (delivery inclusive) of Euro 15,99. The kit consists of a USB sync-cable that connects to the PDA, and a power plug which fits into your car cigaret lighter. The USB connector can be plugged into the cigaret lighter plug to form a car-charge cable for the PDA. You will have to add a male 9 pin D-connector to the PDA connector to be able to connect to the standard cable supplied with the GPS receiver. This requires some fine soldering with a small, very fine-tipped soldering iron.

Following are the connections:

1: Power supply +5 Volts, is also connected to 18

9: Serial port, Ground

10: Serial port, Ground, connect to Ground of your Garmin, pin 5 of the 9 pin D connector

13: Serial port TXD, connect to Data-in of your Garmin, pin 3 of the 9 pin D connector

17: Serial port RXD, connect to Data-out of your Garmin, pin 2 of the 9 pin D connector

18: USB port, +5 Volts, is also connected to 1

19: USB port, Ground

20: USB port, +Data

21: USB port, -Data

22: Shielding, Ground

 

The resulting cable:

  The cable may still be used as a sync-cable and the added serial port could even be used for other purposes.

Note: all information on this page is to be used at your own risk.