Major hassle;Quad constellation, GLONASS,GPS watch, Android

jago25_98 · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 01, 2006 Posts: 32

Can you advise me what the best setup I can get these days? The best I had was a i9100 (SGSII) with the SiRF III unlock hack. That updated really well and the compass tracked instantly. The fix was accurate.
But the problem was that the phone would overheat, especially with Sygic. When the GPS stopped working after an upgrade of Cyanogenmod I tried for weeks to get it working again (replacing gps.so, gpsd.conf and sirf.so or something). In the end I gave up and bought a Galaxy Nexus (i9250) - since this has NFC support.
Frustratingly Samsung have stopped making the batteries so it has taken me ages to find a real NFC battery with all the fakes out there. This is useful since replacing the batteries with an external charger is quicker to swap than trying to charge it through the USB connection like you have to put up with on modern phones with non replaceable batteries.
My Nexus works... but the GPS is inaccurate. I'm not sure why. It's basically no good for playing Ingress for example ( a great test of GPS). It jumps around. The compass doesn't face the right way even after calibration and aGPS update. This is around the coast of Morroco (Las Palmas). Norway wasn't much better. I noticed the timezone from the mobile phone company here is set wrongly (+2 GMT when it should be +1) - but I have updated that manually now in the phone. I wonder if the GPS firmware is wrongly still using time from the cell network. But since GPS chipsets are closed source, we have no way to diagnose.
I wonder if a different radio firmware driver might help... but I don't want to mess with this unless I have to.

I've now found that you can get phones with GLONASS support. This is the russian satalite system. If you search for 'list of phones with glonass' you will find a list on wikipedia. It turns out that there is now a chipset or 2 out there with support for the 2 other contellations; the Chinese one and the Japanese one - that's a total of 4 systems. This means 30-40 satelites now visible out of a max of 100, instead of 4-8 typical on Android phones.
Is there anything out there that supports this though? Anything that can share this out over to a phone?

I also have an external siRF-II Bluetooth reciever. This works really well but since you can't get replacemnet batteries for it it doesn't last long unless plugged into a car. Also, switching to an external GPS bluetooth provider in a phone is really clunky.

Because of all this hassle I looked into GPS watches. But then I found the battery on these things then becomes a problem.

What's a guy got to do to get a decent GPS fix? Jeez!

jago25_98 · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 01, 2006 Posts: 32

If this thread has peaked your interest then you'll like some keywords:

GPS = USA
GLONASS = Russia
beidou-2 = china
GNSS Galileo = EU
IRNSS = India
QZSS = Japan (proposed)

sIRF, i9250, 9100, CM11, NFC

M8TJT · Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2014 8:12 pm Post subject:

SGSIII has Glonas tracking as does the Nexus10

DennisN

jago25_98 · Occasional Visitor Joined: May 01, 2006 Posts: 32

OK. I think the best thing to do is wait. The GLONASS phones will come down in price and also there could be support for the quad constellation chips at some point. Kind of difficult to know how long the wait might be.

If you ever hear of a phone or anything else that seems to have better support than what we've seen before please reply to this thread :-)

Seems I should have gone for the SGS3 I9300 instead of this nexus. Now the SGS4 is out they're much cheaper.

Guess I will wait a little bit.

M8TJT · Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2014 4:39 pm Post subject:

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