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Satellite Shutdown at High Noon on Sunday?


tangerineman

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I was out caching yesterday between the 404 and 48, at Vivian Road, heading through the bush, zeroing in on a cache that has long eluded me, when my almost fully charged Magellan Explorist dropped all satellite feed for about 3 or 4 minutes. I mean completely dropped. On the Satellite page, you know, the one with the image of Earth, the slate was absolutely clean, no icons representing satellites at all.

 

When the GPSr started picking up signal again, it took a bit of time for it to figure out where we were, with caches in Markham showing as being 485km away.

 

Did anyone else notice this? It was just after noon on Sunday.

 

Or.....has anyone had this happen to their unit at any time?

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This is normal behavior. What most likely happened is the GPS receivers get their information about the satellites from the satellites themselves. Everyone once and a while, the GPS will dump the data it has and re-download the information to get the most current information. During this the GPS will not function or show any satellites because it does not know about them.

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Thanks for your reply. It's the first time I've had this happen - next time I'll know that the interruption's only going to be brief. I was somewhat buried in a marshy forest at the time, and hoping for a direct route back out. ..several minutes later I was back in business, but curious about what had happened.

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This is normal behavior. What most likely happened is the GPS receivers get their information about the satellites from the satellites themselves. Everyone once and a while, the GPS will dump the data it has and re-download the information to get the most current information. During this the GPS will not function or show any satellites because it does not know about them.

 

Holy cow, how can this be true? I can't believe ALL satellites go down for a period of time just like that. I wanna say your receiver got confused for a few minutes.

 

Don't forget more and more commercial services rely on GPS for pretty critical things (like landing airplanes, etc). I know the US Military can play around with SA and so on, but it just doesn't make sense to me that whole system goes down like that!

 

Source of info?

 

ChrisW

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