Jumping Gps

[+coastal cachers]

While caching in a very open area on a peninsula on the coast, my GPS suddenly took an offset about 100 yards to the south and continued to plot along as though I was in the ocean. It later took a similar offset to the north and kept plotting there too. When I left the area, it worked normal again. I had a strong 4 satellite signal with one WAAS. Anyone have an idea what would cause this? Jamming?

[Magellin]

sup?

Just a thought.. only 4 sats!

1) Stand steady make sure Ant is pointing directly up (if under tree's ).

2) With only four sat's showing, you might have been getting heat distortion (yes, heat distortion). "Night Time" is the best time for A true "LOCK".

3)Or, one or more of the sat's being tracked might have fallen off while another or others took over on reception to your part of the Globe?

all are possible.

4)Week batteries?

 

would like to know why you only have 4 sat's being recieved

[+WeightMan]

Yesterday, I was doing some maintenance on a cache I just adopted. I had found it over a year ago and had not been back since. I was sure i knew where it was, but had the GPSr on to double check the coords. As I was leaving the area of the cache and heading back to the car, I took a look at the map for the first time. There was a track due north then jogging west before going back to due north. The total north-south distance was about 1.6 miles. Fresh batteries and the GPSr was on my hip most of the time with the antenna pointing straight up. The track was a single track indicating t me that it either came back along the same route (highly unlikely) or just popped back to the right spot sometime along the way.

[+coastal cachers]

When I say I had 4 satellites, I had more, but they were not indicating steady signals, ie, they would got from 0 to some signal strength level and back fairly frequently.

I changed the batteries out to see if that was the cause and it seemed to have no effect.

Heat distortion could be the answer since it was a warm sunny day and I was on a peninsula with cold ocean water all around it.

Thanks for the help.....

Edited May 3, 2004 by coastal cachers

[Jeremy]

Moved to the getting started forum

[jfreeman_bsj]

Hmm, very interesting. My Legend has done this a few times when I am navigating toward a cache. It is usually from 300-100 feet out when it happens. This has happened a few times, so I almost think is a glitch in the software.

[Kerry.]

Jamming? No. But GPS is a very Dynamic system and normally so is the (handheld) user. Simply turning around, moving the receiver to view something, turning the receiver, tilting the receiver could change things. One reason why GPS specifications are for Signal-In-Space (SIS) characterics as the operators have no control over how users apply the technology.

 

Then again it could be the system itself, maybe an incident with rising/setting satellites where there's a flutter in signals on the horizon. Could in fact be many things but the description of the problem isn't jamming.

 

Cheers, Kerry.

[+Team Aspenoro]

Bermuda triangle?

[+crzycrzy]

Actually, odds are you were receiving 'ghosting' kind of like what you saw on old tv sets where the picture seems to appear a little to the left or right of the picture.

With the GPSr (r means receiver) it can happen when you are near mountains, or near large bodies of water.

Funny story, once I was driving up a mountain and suddenly my legend told me I had gained 15,000 feet in altitude. (I was on a 5,600 range.) Same thing. It was simply receiving reflected signals confusing the GPS...