M400 and new L5s

[MSBilbao]

Hi all
I am the team advisor for a team of university students that build a motorbike for a competition. We are using Motec ECUS. We own an old M48, an M400 and a M130.
We had used before a second hand 2d datarecording telemetry set, which included a GPS mouse, which we modified so it could be used in our M400. It worked flawlessly, until it lost the configuration (probably because the battery got depleted). So, in order not to loose time in that, we decided to buy the L5 provided by Motec. Motec components are not cheap, but, until now, all the components have worked very well so i consider the money well spent. It was not the case with the L5. It never worked. I let the students do the job because it is the only way to learn, but they were not able to make it work. I blamed them (now i have to apologize) because I would never expect that there was a problem with a component provided by Motec for a Motec ECU. After a full year i decided to take care myself of the problem. The L5 did not want to work, so i decided to check both the ECU and the GPS. I made two cables, one to fake a GPS from a Laptop and another to check the GPS. Both worked well. After a lot of tests, i noticed that the GPS was sending messages in the form GNGGA and GNRMC, while the M400 only accepted GPGGA and GPRMC. The problem was now clear. The GPS (a locosys 23036-G) was a GPS/GLONASS/GALILEO/.. and so the talker id (first two letters in the message) were GN instead of GP, and this was not accepted by the old M400. So I decided to ask my distributor for a solution, which could be a firmware update to the M400 or an older GPS. To my surprise, they answered me that Motec UK said that they only were willing to test the GPS and they would charge 70 Euro plus shipping costs, because we have modified the GPS (we shortened the wire just to reduce the possibility of noise just in case it was the reason of the problems). This is ridiculous. I can understand that Motec would not realize of the problem (it is a quite old ECU), but it is clearly their responsability. I really like motecs hardware. The injector management in the M130 is really amazing, especially for teaching. But this is unacceptable. I finally managed to make the GPS work. I found some specific information on the Mediatek MTK3333 which the GPS is based on and was able to disable GLONASS/GALILEO/.. and let only GPS, and the talkerid changed to GP, but at the cost of relying only on GPS system. At least it works, but, I spend 200 euros to avoid problems (i could reprogram myself a 20 euros GPS) and I found a lot, and Motec UK did not make any effort to help. In any case, i want to warn Motec not to sell newer L5s to owners of M400 ecus. They will not work unless GLONASS/GALILEO/... are disabled.