Apparent GPS Failure

[Audiophobe]

Trouble again! M wife got an eris, got it working, now my Motorola is not locating me correctly. Anyone else having issues? new prl 65085:icon_evil:

Yes.
I occasionally have to reboot (remove battery) for the GPS to locate me. Once done it works well.

 

[ronsurf69]

Yeah, tried all that, then it just magically started to work. Guess I should just stop worrying!

 

[LandoGriffin]

Here's some info based on my own observations (for what its worth). Sounds like some people are having a little bit different experience than I was, but here goes:

At home, my phone kept saying my location was either Los Angeles, or Irvine. I'm in Redondo Beach so one was off by 20 miles, and the other was off by 40 miles. That's annoying. I discovered that in my settings, under "locations and security" that i had both the 1st and 2nd checkboxes checked. I unchecked the first box called "use wireless network"...and that seems to have fixed it. I've been Redondo Beach ever since.

Secondly, before that issue I was enjoying my turn-by-turn gps all over town until after having the phone for about 36 hours, the maps program just died. It would not launch, it just said, "sorry! the maps program...blah blah...please try again". I found other forums on google and motorola sites and a ton of people had that problem. The concensus was that people who had downloaded gps toggle switch widgets soon had problems. I did the factory reset, stayed away from the gps toggle switches...no problems since (yet).

Moral of the story, I'd stay away from GPS toggle switches, and turn off "use wireless network" if you are able to get a GPS signal.

That's all I got.

this totally worked for me!!
thanks!!!

 

[mattygabe]

I really hate to try and stir this up again, but I'm assuming the general GPS failures from time to time are prevalent in any low-power application of a GPS chip such as these ones, and no smartphone (iPhone, Pre, etc) is immune, but it's happened a total of three different times in the past two days to me. First two it took 10 minutes to find the tower, and then today I was running late, and as it was docked in my Seidio Innotraveler, it took the entire trip (~45 minutes) and still never found my location.

I do have Weatherbug installed, so I disabled it's usage of any GPS and just manually entered my zip code (should help with battery a little, too), and I also disabled cell tower location as one of the suggested fixes. Any other ideas? After I rooted, I did *228-2'd it a couple times, I had some voice data issues, so I should have a fairly up-to-date PRL whatever it may be (but do I even need a PRL at this point since I disabled data location lookup?) I'm trying to have my droid replace my Garmin Nuvi, but if I'm taking a trip to somewhere I have no clue where it's at, I'd hate to be stranded because my stupid phone's GPS decided to stop working.

 

[mattygabe]

I really hate to try and stir this up again, but I'm assuming the general GPS failures from time to time are prevalent in any low-power application of a GPS chip such as these ones, and no smartphone (iPhone, Pre, etc) is immune, but it's happened a total of three different times in the past two days to me. First two it took 10 minutes to find the tower, and then today I was running late, and as it was docked in my Seidio Innotraveler, it took the entire trip (~45 minutes) and still never found my location.

I do have Weatherbug installed, so I disabled it's usage of any GPS and just manually entered my zip code (should help with battery a little, too), and I also disabled cell tower location as one of the suggested fixes. Any other ideas? After I rooted, I did *228-2'd it a couple times, I had some voice data issues, so I should have a fairly up-to-date PRL whatever it may be (but do I even need a PRL at this point since I disabled data location lookup?) I'm trying to have my droid replace my Garmin Nuvi, but if I'm taking a trip to somewhere I have no clue where it's at, I'd hate to be stranded because my stupid phone's GPS decided to stop working.

Also, I forgot to mention... After reading a few of the initial November 09 posts that started this thread, I downloaded the top two GPS information apps. I really like GPSTest, and it seems to help my phone find the satellites. Wishful thinking? Perhaps.

I just tried it again, I opened navigation (Car Home -> Navigation) and it told me my location was temporarily unavailable. Exited home, then opened GPSTest. First, told me it saw 8 sats, then after a while (~10s) connected to 6 of them. Re-opened Nav, entered a point on the map, and it immediately found my location. Is GPSTest perhaps providing a ping that is the jolt the GPS chip needs to complete a handshake or two?

 

[rjs5117]

just wanted to throw this out there to anyone having this problem still. i'll admit i haven't read all 52 pages of this thread (only about 15 total), so i apologize if this has already been suggested.

today i drove about half way across the state of pa coming home from school, and my gps worked fine all the way home. once i was home, i tried to fire it up again and it wouldnt work. gps status showed 8 satellites and no locks. it occurred to me that since i had been using pete's bugless beast rom, i might have needed to update my tower info. i *22899'ed and immediately my phone locked all 8 sats within 10 seconds, and this was after 5 hours of being unable to use gps in any app, nandroid restores, cache wipes, data wipes, and everything under the sun.

might be worth giving a shot to anyone who is still experiencing this. this probably wont help anyone whose phone has been freshly activated (as this is essentially the verizon activation process), but considering that it only takes like 45 seconds total, it has to be worth a shot.

i'll post back if my situation changes.

 

[brochaos]

i too had weekly gps problems. every 4 or 5 days it would not locate me accurately. a restart always fixed it. i got fed up and just did a factory reset on my phone. my theory was that it was some kind of gps app conflict. now, i have not installed ANY apps from teh market that require GPS. so far i'm 2 days in, and all is good. if it still fails, then i'll at least know it wasn't beautiful widgets/places/compass or any of the other dozen or so gps based apps i had.