Parkade = No GPS

Maheriano · 05-04-2009, 11:19 AM

When I got back to Canada after living in the USA last year, I finally got a minute to sit down and upgrade everything on my car PC and after I did that my GPS stopped working properly. The symptoms were that it would just sit on the screen without finding me nor tracking my movement and if I put in a location it would just continue waiting forever for a lock. I'd have to reboot whenever I wanted to use it, this has been going on since last July when I returned. I finally figured it out this weekend....

I went on a weekend trip to the mountains to spend the weekend doing some spring snowboarding in the Rockies (WOOHOO!) and the GPS never skipped a step, it worked every time. So it turns out that once I enter the parkade to my apartment at home, something goes haywire with the GPS receiver and it won't work again until I reboot. As long as I park the car outside as I did all weekend, it works no problem. This is the first time my car has been parked for any period of time anywhere but the safety of my parkade.

So there you go, if you find your GPS isn't working intermittently, make sure you're not leaving it for long periods of time under a barrier from the sky.

For those that care:
- iGuidance 2003
- Holux 213U GPS receiver
- GPS receiver mounted in fan shroud inside dash
- M10000 motherboard, GPS plugged directly into board
- newest version of Road Runner
- happens on Steel Blues, Carwings Dynamic and eLite Lite skins. Never tried others.

Injector · 05-04-2009, 12:32 PM

i think what happend is called a cold start, when you bought the antenna it should say somewhere cold start: xx minutes and hot start: xx minutes, because the antenna's internal memory keeps a cache of the recently used satellite locations so it gets a lock faster but if was without power for a while i guess it lost it's memory and had to start from scratch.

Crinos · 05-04-2009, 01:01 PM

A way to solve this is to give the antenna a feed, even when the computer/car is shut down.

In my "soon to be obosleete" Becker Navigation unit, the unit draws tiny amounts of mA to keep the stored memory/settings and the GPS signal going.
If I remove the power from the unit, I must be under clear sky for about 2-3 minutes before it come back "online" again

Maheriano · 06-17-2009, 11:34 AM

So I figured it out that it's not the parkade killing my navigation apparently. I don't often use the GPS so I just run the music screen most of the time however I moved around the city a lot last week so I kept it on the GPS screen all day every day. As long as I kept it mostly on the GPS screen, it worked no problems every time. Once I spent any amount of time on another screen and hibernated/dehibernated on another screen, then went back to navigation, it wouldn't find my position. So why is it working fine only when left on this screen? That's really weird. Any ideas?

Injector · 06-17-2009, 12:09 PM

what frontend are you using?

Injector · 06-17-2009, 12:11 PM

nvm i just saw the skins you are using which means rr, try opening the task manager and check if iguidance closes when you change screens.

Maheriano · 06-17-2009, 02:55 PM

I use mostly Carwings Dynamic but it also happened on Steel Blues and I sometimes switch to eLite Lite but the dark colours make it hard to deal with.

So should I expect iGuidance to close or not close when I switch screens? I don't think it does because I can plan a route, go to the music screen and it'll still tell me when a turn is coming up.

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