With the 3.2 release, Betaflight finally has decent GPS support. Here are some of the navigation features you can have on Betaflight OSD:

• Latitude
•  Longitude
• Distance to home
• Speed
• Arrow pointing home

Even better: if you have a telemetry-enabled receiver such as the X4R or XSR, you can send your location to the Taranis in real time. The Taranis will log your position, and keep the last known position available in case of a crash. This means it could save you time and maybe money in the long run.

This unit comes preconfigured and ready to wire to a flight controller. However, if you want to mess with the settings you can configure it via a serial UART and u-center for Windows. This video is still mostly relevant if you need to do that.

Wiring the gps unit is easy: just connect it to a free UART on your flight controller. Make sure that the wires are long enough that you can mount the gps on top of your quad.  If you are running a bottom mounted battery, the top of your HD camera mount is the best spot. I run a top mount, so I prefer heat shrinking the gps to a battery strap so I can have it on top of the battery.

Once wired, configuring the gps is easy.  On the ports tab of Betaflight, select gps as a peripheral for the UART to which it’s wired. In this case I used UART 3.

Then in the configuration tab:

And if everything is wired correctly, when you restart betaflight you should see the GPS indicator light up at the top of the screen.

Now there are two things you can do. If you have Betaflight OSD, you probably want to enable gps coordinates, distance to home and direction to home. I also like having the satellite count and gps speed, even though it’s not very accurate. My screen looks like this:

The home arrow indicates that I’m flying mostly away from myself and 145 meters away. The GPS coordinates show that I am in… [left as an exercise for the reader].

The second thing you could do is set up your Taranis to log gps coordinates (assuming your receiver has telemetry, won’t work with an xm+). I won’t cover that now because this is enough for one post, I’ll save it for a future one. Happy flying and hope this saves you from losing a quad or two!