Tomtom Bluetooth GPS Receiver Problems

[Essexboy]

Advice,comments or any help would be much appreciated. Bought my T3 with the tt bluetooth GPS receiver in Feb 2004. Had non stop intermitent connection problems which were queried with tt from time to time on their website until the unit finally died in Sept 2005. TT replaced the unit with the same silver tt bluetooth GPS receiver at reduced cost to me because the original was out of the 12 month warranty. This unit started to display the same connection failures as the first one within 1 week. This is really annoying me as it makes my satnav product completly unreliable. The gps unit will not always display the green and blue connection lights when switched on (turning on/off or running battery flat for soft reset makes no difference). The next day i might get the blue and green lights and the unit connects as it should. Then during my journey the gps unit will loose the connection T3 screen goes grey and the gps unit eithers shows a constant red or blue light. That's it, no amount of fiddling will allow me to re-connect, no matter if i soft reset the t3, turn the gps on/off, delete the gps and drivers from the t3 and put them on again. The unit may work the next day or not!! As you can see this is really getting on my wick!! Has any one else experienced similar problems? I did pick up on a comment on this website previously regarding the tt car cradle mount and reliability issues with bluetooth connection. Should I opt for a different gps unit? Please any help would be gratefully received!!

[eillo7]

Essexboy,

Sorry to hear the problems you're having. I had the Tomtom MkI receiver for a year or so - it never gave me grief the way yours is, but it was never that reliable either. It often took 15-20 minutes to get a fix, so I always had to remember to fire it up long before I needed it.

I recently bought a Holux GPSlim 236 and I'm really impressed with it. TTFF is almost always under a minute, and it is remarkably good at keeping a strong signal lock wherever I throw it in the car - even in the glovebox! Makes the Tomtom MkI look like a slug...

According to PGPSW the Guidetek GS-R238 SiRFStarIII has the same innards but seems to me to have a nicer looking shell than the Holux. See here http://www.pocketgpsworld.com/gs-r238.php

[MikeProcter]

[MikeProcter]

PS the power switch arangement with the Mk1 BT is not good. The car cradle will not affect the BT performance at all, only wired receivers. I have had to replace my cradle as it stopped transmitting data from the wired GPS unit to the T3, but it would still charge my BT receiver.
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Skoda Columbus and for emergencies: TomTom + iPhone 4 & TomTom car kit

[Essexboy]

Thanks for your comments eillo7 & Mike. Just to add mine, I have never had problems with the time the gps takes to get a fix, usually less than a minute, but sometimes between 5-10 mins when moving off straight away or travelling away from my london office (not sure why that would make a difference though?). The gps unit is always connected to T3 cradle, which in turn is always powered via the cig lighter (even when the keys are out of the ignition). The reasons I mentioned the lights on the bt unit is because if the blue & green lights don't appear after pressing the power button I know that I won't be getting a connection. Recently I started to power the bt unit off after a journey, because I found that this helped the problem in terms of getting a connection next time I was in the car. You see the bt unit seems to have a mind of its own - get a connection and loose it immediatly, get a connection and loose it after an hour, their is no theme or common trait, other than when you loose connection, that's it for the day. When the unit was left powered all the time, it would go weird overnight and give me problems in the morning, or inbetween stops on my journeys. When the connection fails the bt unit displays a constant red light or blue and thats why I mentioned it. I know the unit shouldn't behave like this, so something somewhere must be causing a confliction. Have spoken with tt support line yesterday and they are going to replace the bt unit, phone/power lead and the T3 cradle to see whether this cures the problem. My only other question would be whether it was a software problem. I run tt nav 3 version 4.40 with speed camera databases and voices, I have delayed installing the latest update for obvious reasons.

[MikeProcter]

lets hope the replacements sort you out so you can upgrade. 5.12 is much better than 4.4.

Mike
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Skoda Columbus and for emergencies: TomTom + iPhone 4 & TomTom car kit

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