GR-231 increased acquisition time

[ldormon]

All

My tried and tested old gr-231 seems to be taking a turn for the worst, it can take up to 10mins these days to do an acquistion from cold and seems to be getting worse? If it's broken how does it work at all? I notice there's no firmware upgrade for it

I know the answer is to go and buy a shiny new one

Cheers
Lee

[mikealder]

Lee welcome to the forum, It sounds like the back-up battery has failed, this is a small battery fitted in addition to the main rechargeable cell. It is used to store the ephemeris data, when this is available the unit has a quick time to first fix.
If this data is poor, out of date or simply not present (often due to a bad back-up battery) then the device downloads the data from the satellites which typically takes around 12 minutes, from this point onwards it will reliably work until switched off, which will erase the important ephemeris data from the device - in short, without current ephemeris data the satellite signal acquistion and position fix will be much longer.

You could get it fixed, but to be honest I would take a look at one of the newer devices that are available now - Mike

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