Cannot enable AGPS-MSB without a SIM
Enabling gps-nmea
without a SIM card was implemented in 63dd4ad2. The commit added this comment:
* @MM_MODEM_LOCATION_SOURCE_AGPS_MSB: Mobile Station Based A-GPS location requested. In MSB
* A-GPS, the position fix is computed by the modem, but it first gathers information from an
* online server to facilitate the process (e.g. ephemeris). The modem must have a valid SIM
* card inserted and be enabled for this mode to be allowed. Since 1.12.
AGPS-MSB indeed needs external data to function, but it can be (and usually is) downloaded through WLAN or some other network interface.
With the 1.23.4-dev version, this fails without a SIM (gps-nmea
can be enabled):
$ mmcli -m any --location-enable-agps-msb
error: couldn't setup location gathering: 'GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.ModemManager1.Error.Core.WrongState: Wrong state: Cannot enable location 'agps-msb': device not yet enabled'
Geoclue tries to enable AGPS-MSB on modems which support it, and unless there are other technical reasons to prevent it on non-enabled (SIMless) modems, I think this should be possible.