Rob's Rants

GPS Satellite

After more than a month of struggling with the slow GPS lock on the Dash 3G I may have found something that speeds up the lock times a little. Using a freeware program called GPS Test (freeware from a British company called Chartcross), the onboard GPS seems to use a much more efficient search algorithm and finds a lock faster. Still not as fast as my OnCourse bluetooth GPS, but in a few tests much faster than the built-in GPS by itself.

I’ve found that starting GPS Test and letting it find the satellites, and then switching to Google Maps or another application works fairly well. I’ll keep trying this and we’ll see if it really makes the system more usable.

I’ve mentioned the poor lock time of the Dash 3G GPS previously (see this and this). Here are some real-world times.

Yesterday, I was sitting in a window seat of my train home. I opened Google Maps and let the GPS search. The phone was right next to the glass. GPS lock time: NEVER. No satellite lock was achieved in 10 minutes of trying. (Google Maps appears to have a 5 minute timeout if no GPS signal is obtained. I waited two full timeout cycles before giving up.)

So, when I got to my train station, I stood in the middle of an empty parking lot. No trees or anything for 100+ yards in any direction and no tall buildings at all. Time to find a GPS lock: 3 minutes 50 seconds. To put it simply, that is pathetic. I might as well bring my topo map and compass.

I certainly hope that HTC or someone at XDA-Developers can help sort this out because a GPS with performance that poor borders on useless.