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Worst Satellite Alignment Ever


travisl

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877b0897-288c-492d-8d6c-56c9da6f6883.jpg

 

So I'm doing a maintenance run on my Seventeen Pedestals cache, and for the heck of it (more out of habit), I bring my Etrex, fire it up, and watch the screen. A normal-looking satellite configuration appears, they lock in one by one, accuarcy is shown as 177 feet, then -- bam! -- the screen clears of all birds, they reappear, and it tries to get a lock again.

 

By now I'm at the cache, and set the Etrex down on top of a nearby log. I check out the cache, re-hide it, and when I look at the GPS again, I see the configuration in the photo above.

 

True, the field I was in had clear views, almost to the horizon, to the north and west. But what's really going on here?

 

I turned it off a few minutes later, walked back to the car, and fired it up again as I drove away. Soon, a normal-looking configuration is back, with decent accuracy.

 

Weird. <_<

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My guess would be a display/processing glitch in the GPSr. It seems rather odd that ALL the sats are on the horizon AND you're getting that good a signal from them (even if there is a clear view). From what you said, the GPSr hiccuped, reinitialized the sat links and ended up in the weird horizon line. After restarting back in the car, it got its act together again.

 

Hmmm... I've got a Magellan so I'm not that familiar with Garmins. Do they run on Windows 98? Looks like a Bill Gates Ctrl-Alt-Del situation! <_<

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It sounds to me like the almanac info got corrupted then was fixed when resent.

 

I only know about the process from reading the manual, so don't know all the technical intricacies.

 

I can tell you I've had my eTrex fire up believing there were no satellites to look for until it locked on (skipping the grey "thinking about it" step) and then a full constellation appearred as it thought about and locked the rest--last Sunday morning was the most recent time.

 

Usually in those instances, simply waiting until the almanac is resent takes care of it (at the most 15 minutes away if I remember correctly)...

 

Enjoy,

 

Randy

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So I'm doing a maintenance run on my Seventeen Pedestals cache, and for the heck of it (more out of habit), I bring my Etrex, fire it up, and watch the screen. A normal-looking satellite configuration appears, they lock in one by one, accuarcy is shown as 177 feet, then -- bam! -- the screen clears of all birds, they reappear, and it tries to get a lock again.

 

By now I'm at the cache, and set the Etrex down on top of a nearby log. I check out the cache, re-hide it, and when I look at the GPS again, I see the configuration in the photo above.

 

True, the field I was in had clear views, almost to the horizon, to the north and west. But what's really going on here?

 

I turned it off a few minutes later, walked back to the car, and fired it up again as I drove away. Soon, a normal-looking configuration is back, with decent accuracy.

 

Weird. :lol:

Did you see any strange saucer-shaped aircraft at the time? I hear they really screw the signal up!

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Maybe the President was flying over.

I believe I experienced this last Sunday while caching. My wife and I were out hiking and trying to find a cache. I had good satellite locks and the GPSr was going crazy. The accuracy was jumping around from 420ft...580ft...675ft. Directional arrow was pointing left, pointing right.....it ended up that we were 2ft away from the cache. :lol: Anyway, President Bush was in town and may have been taking off or in the air at that time.

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The nice thing about Garmin is that they constantly update their firmware. Be sure you are running the most recent version. It's a pretty simple process. Just be sure to save your waypoint/track/route data because they will be deleted with the upgrade.

 

The last upgrade for the eTrex series added (finally) a west coast WAAS satellite. I now regularly get that long-awaited 9 feet of accuracy. I even had it read 7 feet once!

 

;)

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