how long to acquire satellites on a Q1?

[cookiemonster]

hi

Quest 1, out the box, peeled off the the plastic over the display, plug it in and get "acquiring satellites", just like the book says (see i did rtfm first )

Now, 25 minutes later its still acquiring satellites. If i hit "find" it thinks its in an area about 10 miles from me (so, it doesnt think its in antartica and is struggling to come to terms with moving 10,000 miles; it just cant find the satellites). Before someone suggests that I take it out of my farady caged basement, I have it sitting outside on the patio in the garden. I'd even fetch it a drink if it could find some bl**dy satellites.

At what point should my (very lacking) patience run out and I take it back and complain? Or, is there something really really obvious, so obvious in fact they dont even bother puting it in the book, something only a complete tool would overlook, that I'm missing here?

And, yes, all of a sudden £130 for a Quest doesnt seem like the bargain it did earlier...

jon

 

[John Armstrong]

Take it on a walk to the nearest open space. The more sky it can see the more chance it has. Also, is hte clock close to being right as if it isn't the gps will be confused as the almonac data will not reflect the satellites. AFAIK YMMV etc etc

 

[Deleted account 211025001]

Fret not ye of little patience

I asked the same question when I bought my Quest a week or so ago and refer the hounarable gentleman to the link:

http://www.ukgser.com/forums/showthread.php?t=69711

HTH
Andres

PS That's the 2nd Q. I've been able to answer today, I'm getting to be quite a GPS expert don't ya know

 

[cookiemonster]

OM: you are indeed wise in the ways of the GPS

It seems that it just needed a 250ml bottle of stella bringing out to it. As soon as I wander over with the beer it sprang into life.



Once again I am surrounded by an aura of Zen Calm

 

[Mutley]

OM: you are indeed wise in the ways of the GPS

It seems that it just needed a 250ml bottle of stella bringing out to it. As soon as I wander over with the beer it sprang into life.



Once again I am surrounded by an aura of Zen Calm

Have no fear young Jedi, you have made a wise purchase and you will soon wonder how you ever coped without your new best pal - the Quest

 

[Blackal]

OM: you are indeed wise in the ways of the GPS

It seems that it just needed a 250ml bottle of stella bringing out to it. As soon as I wander over with the beer it sprang into life.



Once again I am surrounded by an aura of Zen Calm

Ahah! 250ml bottles? You gave it a clue............... When it sensed the miserly bottle, it knew it was in England and checked out the local satellites.

If you had turned up with a case of Belhaven, it would have looked at the satellites over Scotland.

Keep going with 250ml bottles and it won't be Zen you are surrounded with, it'll be feckin bottle-tops! (unless you are a girlie)

Al

 

[PanEuropean]

Quest 1, out the box, peeled off the the plastic over the display, plug it in and get "acquiring satellites... Now, 25 minutes later its still acquiring satellites...

Hi Jon:

What happened was this: Because the GPSR had never been turned on before, it didn't know where it was (or, to be more precise, it thought it was either in Kansas, Taiwan, or London, depending on what basemap it had in it). So, it started to look for satellites where it figured they would be as viewed from one of those three locations. If it was manufactured more than 6 months ago, its internal almanac would have been out of date, thus making matters more difficult.

Whenever you have a brand new GPSR - or, whenever you do a hard reset on an existing GPSR, and blow out all the non-vol memory - it really speeds the initial satellite almanac acquisition process up if you help the GPSR along by telling it where it is. You can do this by going to the 'GPS Status' page, and just moving the map around until it shows your town. You don't need to be more specific than just your town (say, a 20 mile radius).

Once the GPSR has picked up the satellite constellation once, it will then download the current almanac, which is sort of like a TV Guide for GPSRs - the almanac tells the GPSR where to look for the satellites the next time it gets turned on. It's worthwhile mentioning that if a GPSR has been turned off for more than 6 months (perhaps yours was manufactured more than 6 months ago), the almanac will be out of date, and it will have no idea at all where the satellites should be. As a result, it will take a very long time to get a position fix, even if it is in the same place as it was when it was last turned off.

The newest models of Garmin GPSRs automate this initial acquisition process a bit better - if the GPSR does not get a position fix within about a minute or so, it will ask the user if they are indoors. If the answer is no, it will start asking them where they are located, and it will ask for confirmation that it has the correct date in memory. Once the user tells the GPSR where it is, and confirms the correct date, the initial (first boot) satellite acquisition process speeds up considerably.

Michael

 

[cookiemonster]

Cheers Michael, I was prepared for the wait, 30 minutes seemed a long time... especially when the thing was bought from Halfords. It wouldnt have suprised me if they'd sold me an empty box

Al.

What can I say? I'm born and bred Glaswegian, so generations of wisdom concerning alcohol have been carefully passed down to me. The only beer from scotland that its better off being used to clean grease from a chip fryer is Arran ale. It amazes me that you can cross the border and get some excellent beers - Jennings in Cumbria and a multitude of great beer in the North East of England; but Scotland remains a beer desert.

or something.

 

[chasr]

Have you flipped the antenna up?

 

[PanEuropean]

..I was prepared for the wait, 30 minutes seemed a long time...

I agree with you, 30 minutes is a bit over the top, even for a totally confused GPSR. However, I have encountered the occasional GPSR in aircraft installations that won't ever acquire an initial position fix after being freshly installed (out of the box) unless someone tells it where it is. Once that is done, it will work just fine for the rest of its life.

I have no idea why this is so. Perhaps (this is just a guess) sometimes the new GPSRs might have a corrupted satellite almanac, which would be worse than having an out of date almanac, or no almanac at all.

Michael

 

[Kritou]

Recently bought a Quest that I suspect had been in the shop for a long time. It refused to even look for satellites and just showed Garmin HQ as the centre (center) of the world - having given it an hour at the end of the UK's longest pier and told it where it was, I went home and called Garmin UK. Turn it on, the nice man said, while holding the "zoom out" button - BINGO, eight satellites within a couple of minutes