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finding satellites


gitarmac

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Whenever I turn on my garmin venture it always takes quite awhile to stop searching for satellites and start navigating. when I watch the page it will have found 4 or more satellites with nice big bars but it still keeps searching. Once it has found the satellites it seems to keep them pretty good. I'm wondering why it takes so long. Is there a default time limit it searches for? Also if I have turned it on but am using it with gps off then turn gps on it will immediatly give me a "weak satlillite" message but when I tell it to continue search or restart it readilly aquires them.

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Unless you activate the "Use With GPS Off" options, it will ALWAYS be searching for satellites. The satellites are in constant motion relative to your position (and relative to everything else in the universe, for that matter), and just by walking or driving around you're constantly obscuring and revealing satellites to the receiver.

 

Garmin lists the "cold start" acquisition time as about 45 seconds.

 

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"Don't mess with a geocacher. We know all the best places to hide a body."

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I know it's always "finding satellites" but Sometimes it takes a long time to give me the "ready to navigate" message, even though it looks like it's found plenty of satellites. It seems to happen more if I've used it a few times with gps off, like when I'm indoors putting in waypoints or fiddling with my options. Yesterday it took at least 3 or 4 minutes before it said ready to navigate, but then later that night it only took a few seconds. The think that puzzels me is I can see lots of satelittes on the screen but until it says ready to navigate I have to stand there and wait.

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Garmin says the cold startup time for the eTrex is 5 minutes according to the manual for my Legend. During this time it not only locates the satellites but downloads tables of information from them. The tables are good for 4-12 hours. So if you turn on your GPS later that same day, the startup time is much shorter (about 1 minute based on my experience)

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quote:
Originally posted by fab44:

Garmin says the cold startup time for the eTrex is 5 minutes according to the manual for my Legend.


No, it doesn't. The Legend has a cold startup time of 45 seconds. You're confusing that with the AutoLocate time. AutoLocate is used when you've traveled more than a few hundred miles from the location where you last used the unit.

 

3608_2800.gif

"Don't mess with a geocacher. We know all the best places to hide a body."

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