[FridayNightTV]

I'm surprised you think otherwise.

"Ordinary" antennas are completely passive, just a bit of metal. It's the maths for data recovery and trilateration (not triangulation!) that is processor heavy.

[solardev]

It's the "RF chip" from the other reply I'm curious about. What is it doing when it's in active receiving mode? Is it doing the math on the chip?

[krisoft]

You can buy chips which only do the RF tasks. But you can also buy chips which do “everything”, the RF, the maths, some even do sensor fusion with data from accelerometers and wheel odometry sensors. All in one chip.

You can read here[1] more about what the RF frontend does. This is the crux of it: “Its two-stage receiver amplifies the incident 1575.42MHz GPS signal, downconverts it to a first IF of 37.38MHz, further amplifies it, and then downconverts to a second IF of 3.78MHz. An internal 2- or 3-bit ADC (selectable as a 1-bit sign with a 1- or 2-bit magnitude) samples the second IF and outputs a digitized signal to the baseband processor.”

1: https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/rf-frontend-ic-...