Gpsr Time Variances

[+GeekBoy.from.Illinois]

I already know I'm losing my mind, but that still doesn't change the fact that this just doesn't sound right to me...

 

Both my wife (ClickChik) and I have our our GPSr units (Magellan eXplorist 600), and we had to reset hers last night do to internal flash corruption. After getting hers back up and running I took them both out into our yard to compare the location accuracy when I discovered something else that took my entire attention.

 

This unit sets its internal clock from the satellite data, and I'm not sure if there is an option for the user to change it. Now on to the twist. I put both units in the palm of my hand and started to look at the accuracy when I noticed that the two units different in their clocks by about 3.5 minutes. That didn't seem right to me.

 

Now, does this seem right to you, or is it more likely that one (or both) of our units has bigger problems?

[Michael Cook]

That doesn't seem right to me either. I only have one GPSr (Garmin 60CSx), but if I check it against a radio-controlled clock it shows exactly the same time.

[+geognerd]

You may want to take a look at this topic about the clock in GPSrs, particularly this post. It sounds like your wife's 600 may be showing more accurate time than yours.

 

If this doesn't answer your question, I hope you found it interesting.

[+GeekBoy.from.Illinois]

I did find the information interesting, and I will check tonight to see if it did answer my question...

 

It does concern me that my GPSr is less than a week old, and her is just 3 weeks old, and we are seeing such major variances between them already. Similarly, we are not sure how her unit got corrupted. We both had our units with us, and I dropped mine into my pocket, and she put hers in her purse as we went into a store. When we walked back out, both units were off, and we suspected that to be due to the "5 minute auto power off" feature, but when she tried to turn hers back on, it gave here a message about "initializing the NAND" and would not work. After re-formatting the flash and re-loading the base maps, her unit was back working again, and that was when we noticed the major time difference.

 

***

Update:

On my way home from work tonight, I decided to try a cache (ssphoto's 1117th) and since I "chose poorly", I was on the wrong side of the creek, and had to back-track about a quarter mile on the trail. This gave ClickChik a chance to meet me, and I compared the coordinates and times on the two units. They were now showing the same time (and coordinates). I guess that resetting the unit did fix my time variance. It also reset all of the other settings (and tracks, etc), and I had to manually enter mot it them again. Now to figure out if there is anything I can do to keep this from happening again in the future...

Edited August 3, 2006 by GeekBoy.from.Illinois