Friday, February 27, 2009

Day +968 : GPS – No Show :-)

I am fine today.

In order to demonstrate how GPS works on my new handphone, I brought my family for a ride. We set the GPS destination to Tesco Puchong, and started driving toward our destination.

It was very disappointing to find out that the GPS didn’t work at all. The GPS application, MapKing, just kept quiet throughout the journey to the hypermarket :-( We shopped at TESCO and tried again on the way back but no luck again.

As I am not familiar with how GPS works, I did a search on the internet and zoomed into the satellite signals, which I suspected prohibiting the GPS to start navigating.

When I checked the GPS status on the MapKing, all the satellites shown were red, and it seemed that no satellite signal was detected. This prevented the GPS to acquire satellites that could be used to identify my location.

The satellites were identified, but signals received were not strong enough :-( In my case, the red signal level below were all zero.


I didn’t give up and continue troubleshooting the problem. Sometime, I managed to get good satellite signal, and that was when the GPS worked.

The blue satellites are what we need
I suspect that the GPS receiver of the unit might be faulty. This might be the first consequences of getting an AP set :-(

As I am not a regular traveler, the GPS feature is not a must for me. If I brought back the unit for repair, I worry they might bring in more troubles than fixes, as what my nephew encountered. I am still deciding...

See you next post :-)

4 comments:

Pure Faith said...

u need to stay put until u received sufficient locked on signal, mapking has a voice notification to tell u that gps is active... then u can move/ drive off...

learn more at malfreemaps.com.my

one major disadvantage of pda-based gps is that it lags behind...

David said...

Thanks, Pure Faith, for pointing us to the website and also advice on the use of gps. In fact, I waited for a very long time, but still couldn't locked on to any satellites. The main issues of my concern is all satellites signal are zero when this happen. As such, there is no hope of locking to the satellites.

Anonymous said...

David,

Some good car tint prevent GPS to receive signal, you may need to try outside car to see is the car tinting problem or the unit has problem. :)

David said...

Thanks! But it works inside the same car at some areas only. David