Difficulty finding sats / initialising ?

Deltab · Occasional Visitor Joined: Oct 07, 2004 Posts: 4

I'm using MN4 + Ipaq + BT module GNS-MGPS, and its been working fine in UK, but when firing it up in Italy & Spain I've had major problems trying to get it to find satellites.

Q: Is there some simple sequence of events which can make it find satellites 100% each time ?

I try resets / reboots of the module / going in and out of menus, all sorts of nonsense to try and make it work. When in Italy recently I thought that by using the menus, that was what made it keep searching and not just sit in a endless loop. It probably took about 15 minutes from power on to locking onto a satellite.

Just this weekend in Spain it didn't work at all. Now admittedly I was trying it without a car - which I thought would work. I had the BT unit in my pocket, then in a camera case, then I even had it totally exposed to the sky on an open top bus - and it still wouldn't lock onto any sats. This was after at least 30 minutes of jigging it around.

Q: Can this unit work without sitting on a car dashboard ? I know that sounds crazy, but does the car shell act like some sort of reception enhancer like a satellite dish ?

I also tried running some software called GPSRDSRUN which looked like it was monitoring what the GPS unit was doing - needless to say it was just sitting there with lots of 0 0 0 0 on screen like it could find nothing.

Any help much appreciated.

lbendlin · Posted: Tue Nov 23, 2004 2:41 am Post subject:

TMC may not be available in Italy and Spain, and you may have to stop the receiver from trying.

GPS, on the other hand, should work just fine. But when you get out of the plane you need to give the receiver a chance to re-load the base tables. This is best done with good sky view, and not moving around. Can take anything from 5 to 20 minutes. After this, repeat fixes should be quick - until you get out of the plane again...
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Deltab · Occasional Visitor Joined: Oct 07, 2004 Posts: 4

Sound like a good plan for next time.

To reload the base tables, must the pda be connected and running the navigon software, or can the BT GPS unit do this on its own ?

BTW, just tried it back in UK and it got a fix within 10 seconds...
And TMC works in Italy, for future reference.

lbendlin · Posted: Wed Nov 24, 2004 7:59 pm Post subject:

The GPS never needs the PDA connected - it is fully autonomous.

(swallowing my tongue her because there are some few receivers that only switch on when they have a BT or other connection)
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