MEGA 2560 with Adafruit Ultimate GPS breakout V3

[donerick]

I used McWhorter's Lesson 22 on Youtube.com and your GPS. It works fine with his sketch on my HERO board, clone of a UNO. But I want to use it with a MEGA 2560 Pro. When I try that, his sketch leaves the Serial monitor blank, and the GPS with a blinking light. Another forum said to use one of the other serial ports, not pins 2 and 3. So I moved the GPS to pins 16 and 17, for TXD2 and RXD2. No change; still a blank serial monitor and the same blinking light on the GPS. I'm told that the problem is SoftwareSerial, but I don't know what to do about it

[blnkjns]

Don't use Software Serial on the MEGA. Most boards have dual serial ports, the MEGA even 4, the UNO the only one that does not have it.
So connect the GPS module to pins 19RX/18TX, and start it using Serial1.begin(9600); Use Serial1.read for all GPS module read commands.
Connect the serial monitor through regular Serial.begin(9600); Use regular Serial.print/Serial.write for all serial monitor output.