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Posted: Sat Jul 22, 2006 10:45 am Post subject: gps problems
i found as i mention in my earlier thread, that if you simply plug an external antenae in the back the p550 will have no trouble finding sats and getting a fix and after that it will find them no problem on its own gps ant, and as i use my 550 in the car mainly i always plug the ant in when i put the device in its cradle, i bought my external ant off ebay for less than a tenner including postage so its worth getting one to avoid the aggrevation, but still this does not excuse the fact that the thing struggles to aquire sats off its own back which is a design fault i think and not realy acceptable other than that the p550 is an excellent little pda/gps, before the 550 i had an acer n35 which was a nightmare it struggled to run tt5 and kept shuting down ( this i found was due to memory allocation problems) and the fact that the processors is a dinosaur and probably was the same one used in the 'merlin' handheld games of the 1970's()
anyway the only other thing that lets the 550 down is the power off procedure, which is when you power off on the button on the front it still actually uses power and after a few hours of inactivity you find the battery drained!
Joined: Feb 01, 2006 Posts: 2543 Location: Rainham, Kent. England.
Posted: Sat Jul 22, 2006 2:33 pm Post subject:
Quote:
disables the GPGSV and GPGSA strings in the GPS sentence
It would be interesting to know the various set ups of owners of P350's and P550's using either Mio map or TTN5.
Mine for example on P350 + TTN5, by default, is GGA 1, GLL 0, GSA 5, GSV 5, RMC 1, VTG 1, MSS 0.
Some people have theirs set as above except they have GLL 2, VTG 0 and MSS 1.
I've read GLL - Geographic Latitude and Longitude is a holdover from Loran data and some old units may not send the time and data active information if they are emulating Loran data. If a gps is emulating Loran data they may use the LC Loran prefix instead of GP and VTG - Velocity made good. The gps receiver may use the LC prefix instead of GP if it is emulating Loran output.
Both refer to Loran data or output and Mike (I believe) also stated in another post that you don't need both RMC and VTG.
Surfing I found that NMEA has its own version of essential gps pvt (position, velocity, time) data. It is called RMC.
It would appear from all this that the settings should be GGA 1, GLL 0, GSA 5, GSV 5, RMC 1, VTG 0, MSS 0. (1 = every second, 5 = every one fifth of a second).
Also found an interesting bit about Baud rates.
The NMEA standard is 4800 baud with 8 bits of data, no parity, and one stop bit. All units that support NMEA should support this speed. Note that, at a baud rate of 4800, you can easily send enough data to more than fill a full second of time. For this reason some units only send updates every two seconds or may send some data every second while reserving other data to be sent less often. In addition some units may send data a couple of seconds old while other units may send data that is collected within the second it is sent. Generally time is sent in some field within each second so it is pretty easy to figure out what a particular gps is doing. Some sentences may be sent only during a particular action of the receiver such as while following a route while other receivers may always send the sentence and just null out the values. Other difference will be noted in the specific data descriptions defined later in the text. _________________ Formerly known as Lost_Property
And NO that's NOT me in the Avatar.
Posted: Mon Jul 24, 2006 7:35 am Post subject: the fix
So as promised, Discount Sat Nav did manage to work on the P550 and send it back.
Quote:
Your item has been fix, Mio have found the problems, its the TOMTOM software, nothing to do with the PDA, the TOMTOM software doest have a line to open the GPS com port, I used another test program to open the com port and once opened once it works fine, tested it and now gets a signal in less than 3 mins,
And it now works. Finally!
I need to get US software and I'm nervous about getting easy to use and reliable mapping software that'll work with the P550. Any suggestions? thanks!
foks... just thought i'd pose an update for those interested. i replaced my p550 with a p350 and have noticed that the gps reception is significantly better (possibly 20%?)... with my coated wondscreen though it's still not quite good enough to operate 100% without an external antenna but does maintain a fix much better than the 550 without. Also acquisition times do seem significantly faster with the 350 but this is subjective and I may be wrong. So anyway, for me I reckon I'm stcking with the 350 and buying a SDIO Wifi card :-)
...for me I reckon I'm stcking with the 350 and buying a SDIO Wifi card :-)
May I ask what you propose to do for SD memory when your SD slot is occupied with with the WiFi card?
I believe that there were combined WiFi and memory cards, but that they were expensive and unreliable in use.
Some months ago, I looked to try to get one for my Mio168, but did not find anything suitable (ie over 256MB). Recently, I have not been able to find any combined units. I would be unlikely to consider anything with less than 1GB 66x speed memory - which to be honest, with the inclusion of wifi in so many units these days, I don't expect to find one now or in the future. So I will be waiting for something like the P550, or even the P550 if it's problems are sorted.
I do not dispute that you find your new P350 better for GPS reception than your old P550, but do you know if you had one of the faulty P550s?
Until we are able to see a P550 free of the GPS problems which seem to be affecting a significant number of the recently supplied units (which MIO are replacing) tested side by side with a P350 - I think this question is likely to run - I for one will be sticking with my current unit until this question has been resolved.
I've had the P550 for a about 2 weeks now. The unit has been tested with Navigon 5, TomTom 5.21, I-Go 2006, Fugawi & Pocket Kartex (a swedish map software). All of these works just fine with the P550. However, as described in a number of replies to this thread, you need to do a bit of tweaking when using 5.21.
I use MIO management of the GPS and has set it for Com4 with 4800.
Furthermore, the GPS needs a reset with CE Monitor (Winfast Navigator) once in a while.
Before starting TomTom 5.21 I always start TomTom 2.06 GPS Driver. The GPS driver has been set for NMEA 4800 on Com4. As soon as the GPS Driver gets a fix I start TomTom 5.21 without closing the GPS driver(TomTom set for other NMEA, 4800 and Com4).
Works perfect. A bit of extra hazzle to do the reset of the GPS and needing an extra GPS driver, but it's worth it since Navigon is a slow and crappy navigational software, I-Go lacks some essential functionalities and the others are simply not for driving purposes.
pls can you give me some URL's for the software you recommended..
ie Mio Management, and TomTom 2.06 GPS driver (only- thought its part of TT). Also whats the difference between CE monitor and Winfast Navigator) I got Winfast Navigator installed OK, but ce monitor just seems to re-start Winfast Navigator.
Sorry newby Q's ... just got P550 and new to both PDA's and GPS ! 8O
The Mio Management I refer to is the Windows Mobile 5s management of the GPS com port. You find that under Settings, System and GPS.
I've actually thrown out TomToms 2.06 driver and use VisualGPSce instead, works better and gives a bit more information about the signal levels, used satellites etc (http://www.visualgps.net/VisualGPSce/)
Start VisualGPSce, wait until you get a fix (usually quite fast) and start TomTom after that (do not exit VisualGPSce).
Blue track your advice is a great help and very encouraging !
I'm still not 100% sorted tho'
Got VisualGPSce and agree its great ... works perfectly.
But now TT is playing up again.
Winfast Navigator also plays up - seem to get 'Error cant find a value' messages and 'Couldn't open the GPS_HWCOM COM:2 port!' more than much useful from it. (I set to GPS protocol = NMEA ,Port = GPS_HWCOM, baudrate = 4800 ....... is this all correct ?).
I'd only want to use Winfast Navigator to 'reset GPS' (sounds like a good idea as someone above suggested that the TT software slowness is due to only acesssing a limited number of satelites and this reset increases this.)
I appreciate your help, and incidentally the P550 works great !! its good to have WiFi and GPS in one handheld unit. The GPS works great with other software I particularly like pocket maps ... more details than TT ... may also get memory Maps to see even more detail.
TTom seems the bad guy here ! I specifically got this to help my map shy wife ! ...Was this a Bad decision ???
Should i send it back (to Handtec < 1 week old) and get Mio maps instead (we need europe to street level), or something else ?
I'll try to give you a short step-by-step direction on how I got TT to run on the P550. I agree with that TT seams to be the bad guy, it's seams as if the TT GPS driver s*cks. I've tried my Navigon MN5, Pocket Kartex, Fugawi and i-Go 2006 and they all play a lot better on the GPS side than TT5. But I love the TT5 interface, so I'm sticking to it.
- Start with doing a soft reset
- Start Winfast Navigator
- Ensure that Winfast Navigator is connected to the GPS
- Do a factory reset in Winfast Navigator with both tick-boxes unchecked
- Do a full exit from Winfast Navigator (not just OK)
- Ensure WM5 is managing the GPS and the virtual GPS port is COM4
- Startup VisualGPSce on Com4 with 4800 bps
- Wait until you get a fix
- Startup TomTom v5.21 (haven't tried 5.0 or 5.10)
- Ensure TomTom is set for Other NMEA, 4800 bps and Com4
It should all play nicely now.
I wouldn't go for the Mio Map software since it's v2 on P550 and not v3 as on the newer Mio PNAs. Personally I don't like the v2 but the v3 is based on i-Go 2006 with both POI-warning and TMC embedded. Thinking of maybe changing to i-Go in Q4 when it's released with POI warning and TMC for PDAs.
Thanks Bluetrack all working 100% now (5 bars in TomTom and perfect tracking)...
... yes I agree TT does have a good interface, pity it needs 2 other programs and workarounds to get it going ... I guess thats shoddy software engineering - good job all engineering isn't like this or building woild be falling down all over the place ;-)
Update, now using TT without visualgpsce, not much, if any difference, so they key thing must have been reseting the GPS with Winfast navigator. next time I do a complete reset of the P550 (ie wipe all programs etc.) I'll try TT without any assist or programs.
It appears that TT gets better fixes with use ie once on the move, maybe this was the original problem - there again who can set up a device when driving, without a passenger.
Overall I'm really pleased with the P550 & TT, handheld GPS WiFi, full pocket PC functionality.
I was having slight problems obtaining reliable fixes with my P350 and TTN 5.21. However just whilst I was playing about, I changed the baud rate to 9600 and my problems instantly disappeared. I am now achieving a TTFF of approx 5secs indoors.
Oh well seems my trials and Emails to mio did'nt fall on deaf ears after all, glad I didnt sell any through. This recall will cost them dear 2 test units returning tommorrow
Joined: 08/09/2002 10:45:31 Posts: 31 Location: United Kingdom
Posted: Fri Aug 11, 2006 12:52 pm Post subject:
After reading this thread, I opted for the Destinator 6 software and within the set up there is an option to search for the GPS input. It did this very quickly and found 7 satellites with a fix in seconds. The settings are COM2 port, 4800 baud rate, NMEA protocol. I'm very pleased with it and it's a great improvement over my previous CoPilot iPAQ combination.
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