Did someone steal the satellites?

NigelO · Occasional Visitor Joined: Mar 03, 2006 Posts: 39

On Wednesday evening, I used my CP6 without problem. I've done nothing to it other than to enter a destination on Thursday evening, ready for a trip today.

However, today, during 5 hours of driving, it failed to get a satellite fix.

I soft reset the PDA. I reset the GPS. I even reloaded the CP6 software from the SD card.

During the day, all I ever got was "determining current position". On screen, I nearly always had just the red "led" showing, with occasional yellow, and for a short time, a second yellow, but never a fix.

The GPS status showed that the PDA was talking to the receiver, but it was always stuck at "searching for satellites". If I turned off the BTGPS receiver, the PDA instantly showed "no GPS connection - check connections" (or something like that).

It was clearly finding some satellites, as when I looked at the satellite list, it showed about eight, but all with zero signal strength.

I tried placing the receiver on the dashboard (usually works perfectly from a small cubbyhole in the centre console)

Its almost as if someone turned off all the satellites

Any ideas?

neil01 · Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 9:09 pm Post subject:

Since the sattelites have not been turned off, and you have re-installed CoPilot, it is probably fair to assume that you have not correctly reinstalled CoPilot (hopefully) or, you have a hardware problem.

On the CoPilot front, did you setup the GPS after you reloaded? - it seems to disconnect itself whenever you re-install.

Menu | Options | GPS | Setup GPS | etc

Sorry I can't give further details from here because they will vary depending upon the equipment you have.

I sometimes find that I have more success with the initial fix (or if the PDA has been switched off for a few days, or moved many miles while switched off) if I set it up outside with a good all-round view of the sky, or at an upstairs house window.

PONDEROUS · Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 9:21 pm Post subject:

NigelO writes:

nivek22 · Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 9:31 pm Post subject:

Is the time/date set correctly on your PDA.

I'm not sure if this still causes a problem with cp6 but it's caught me out in the past.

NigelO · Occasional Visitor Joined: Mar 03, 2006 Posts: 39

Funny you should mention the time / date thing. I clicked on just about every screen possible to see what I could find. Somewhere in the GPS settings, it listed the UTS(?) time (1 hour out, probably due to BST) but the date was several days out.

I've also been getting alarms going off for no apparent reason (none set). I get several alarms at the same time on a soft reset.

Looks like its time for a hard reset.

sirhardi · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 13, 2005 Posts: 41

8O

Oh how bizarre is this ??
I too lost the original BT receiver that was shipped with CPL5, it just quit qworking , sees satelites but can't hook into them ... Question

fruit · Posted: Mon May 01, 2006 7:33 pm Post subject:

My ClipOn has stopped working, or at least getting a lock, in ST mode, but works fine in XT. Always worked fine for some 2 or 3 years previously.

Firebird · Lifetime Member Joined: Nov 29, 2005 Posts: 181

MaDProFF · Occasional Visitor Joined: Oct 05, 2006 Posts: 26

Did this problem ever gt solved, or an answer given to give an explanation?
HTC Touch Pro 2
I had this problem this week with CP7 for no reason it found satellites, but could not get a position lock. never had a problem before, though a few times it has taken a while to lock.
I tried everything (In car, out of car, soft resets, updating quickgps, resetting the sat position to nearest city) and all day it was the same, there seem to be 3 or 4 sats found, but no lock.

In the end I did a hard reset that evening, and it seemed to work ok again, but I notice it was finding 5 sats to lock, maybe it has to have 5, seems a lot to give a position. and again ever since works great locking a position in a matter of seconds in general.
Maybe it was atmospheric problem not getting enough sat fixes to give a position?
Maybe Co-pilot is not the way to go?

grmills · Occasional Visitor Joined: Jul 20, 2007 Posts: 14

It needs a minimum of three satellites to provide a basic 2-dimensional fix but accuracy improves significantly with more.

As for "where did all the satellites go?" take a look at this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/19/gps-close-to-breakdown
NAVSTAR-GPS running short of satellites would have more of an impact than the article suggests as a lot of modern infrastructure (trains, mobile phones etc) rely on GPS to generate an accurate time signal. Modern farmers even use differential GPS / EGNOS to spray their fields in a straight line. Your domestic satnav will struggle to correctly identify your location in towns and other areas where roads are close together if they do run short of satellites. The article I read a few weeks ago (in a professional journal, sorry can’t find it now) reckoned it was a lot more serious/likely than the Guardian makes out.

My brother's TomTom and my CP7 were both poor at locking on a couple of weeks ago, not every time in my case but sometimes no fix for an hour or so, so I would suggest that there was probably an outage in the constellation somewhere. The conspiracy theorist in me usually suspects this sort of issue to be a result of the US moving all the satellites out east ready to invade Iranistan or similar but because the signal came back relatively quickly I think it was a malfunction.

Roll on Galileo, which will use GPS and GLONASS satellites as well as its own, so should never run short. In theory…

(Apols for the length of post, I got carried away)

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