Bad Reception

[+Kayak Kouple]

hi all ....I went out caching with a few people sunday & 2 of us kept losing sat. signal & at times the icon that shows u were u r would be off by quite a few miles.....today I meet up with another cacher & he asked us if our gps had any trouble locking in on satelittes on sat...I told him not saturday but sunday we had probs ....was something going on in the air or were the satelittes srewing up???? anyone hear or have this problem???

[+ghs]

Well, I was out on Sunday and didn't have any problems. I just checked solar activity at

 

http://sidc.oma.be/index.php3

 

They indicated that the solar wind was increasing but didn't expect there to be any big effect of it.

[+JDandDD]

What did the constellation of satellites look like? GPSrs generally will not report a fix if the best calculation of EPE (estimated position error) is greater than 100 meters. However, they can be 'fooled' by certain constellations (basically configurations).

 

One example I've been using recently happened a couple of weeks back in my location. The five satellites I could pick up were in basically a straight line from the horizon to the zenith (straight up) in almost a due south to north configuration. For about 40 minutes my GPS was receiving them but couldn't calculate a postion that was what it believed to be within an EPE of 100 m. In fact, the NEMA streams were showing figures that would equate to about 200m.

 

Then, one satellite changed slightly in position and I got a 'fix'. Unfortunately, it showed me about 1.5 to 2 miles SSE of where I was and about 3000 meters (9000 feet) too high. Fifteen minutes later it was able to locate me correctly to within 5m horizontally and 10m vertically as the constellation adjusted slightly.

 

I had this happen this summer as well when I was on vacation a couple of thousand miles away. Got a weird constellation and the GPS for a few minutes showed me 280miles away at 20000ft. It picked up a 5th satellite in about 5 minutes and clicked in.

 

This kind of constellation error may be what you encountered.

 

JDandDD

[geotrouvetout]

Could be that the government was conducting a bird jamming that day in this area.

[+Fred Flintstone]

I was out caching this morning and I had a hard time with my 60 csx locking on and showing that sats were weak. I was up to 60' off of the cache sites on a couple of caches this morning. It can get frustrating.

[+Miragee]

One day last week I was driving my car when I turned on the GPSr. It was trying to figure out where it was and was having a very hard time. At one point, I looked up at it to see the road on the map with the little location triangle "flying" across the map from left to right.

 

Later in the day, I checked the Trip Computer page and it reported a Maximum Speed of more than 900 MPH.

[Neo_Geo]

I had a problem one day while on a road trip a couple a months ago with my 60C. It just stopped receiving any signals when I got to a certain area. It mysteriously started working again on the return trip when I got to about the same area where it had stopped working.

 

Also my wife and I both had problems operating our remote keys on our new Ford Explorer at the same time my GPSr stopped working. Sounds like jamming to me!