GO 800 / 1000 / 2000 / Via / Start 20 and 60 Series (MyTomTom)

[Zsolt Elite Voyager]

[SaabKen]

A month ago I bought the VIA 1505M, my first GPS. It was on sale for Cdn$150.  I compared against Magellan (read horrid online reviews of customer service) and the touted Garmin (hate Garmin's dumbed-down interface) models and concluded TT was the best compromise between the two brands.

Things were ok the first week, although signal acquisition took around 1-2 mins to my dismay.  Then came a road trip to Portland OR and back. Dang EasyPort suction cup kept losing suction on the dash disk after an hour or so. The de-suctioning became more frequent during the next two weeks, often resulting in the unit falling right down to the floor (it's in our Honda Odyssey, on center dash top).  Then increasingly the unit would fail to acquire signals at all, or unable to fully reset upon power on.  I thought the problem was more to do with the falls onto the car floor and got worried that something was damaged. Took it right back to the retailer, receipt, box and all, and they decided to just exchange a new one for me.  Brought it home last night, did the usual software/maps updates first (two downloads took a total of about 80 mins) bringing it up to full update including the latest GPS signal-loss update.  Took the TT out this morning and did the soft reset in open view of satellites, and bingo, it picked them up in about 20 seconds after the initial screens.  Drove around for an hour and the TT worked perfectly.

Best part is, now after shut-off and then a restart (I configured it to go to main menu page upon startup), the TT picks up GPS almost immediately, not having to show the dreaded "waiting for GPS signal" in the center tab or on its own screen.  

I'm beginning to wonder if the first 1505M I got was a dud. Because even some minor buttons and the guidance arrow are different in this new one than that original one.

[SaabKen]

BTW, I've gone away from the dash disk mount (too far to reach unit) and decided to go with a cupholder solution:

http://www.thesource.ca/estore/Product.aspx?language=en-CA&catalog=Online&category=GPS_AutoMounts&pr...

http://images.thesource.ca/images/Online/19/1907014l.jpg

The Source is the reincarnation of the defunct Radio Shack chain in Canada.  With this cupholder mount, I don't have to worry about loss of suction from either a dash-based or windshield-based system. And since it's positioned halfway down the dash center console, it's less conspicuous than being on the dash top of on the windshield. It's also stronger, steadier and very easily and quickly transportable from one vehicle to another.

[richardski]

Hi SaabKen,

That was a good result.  Seems the lack of GPS lock problem is starting to settle down and normal excellent TomTom reception performance is being restored when users upgrade their devices to the latest software.  Now it would be nice to get the old missing features back

Excellent find on cupholder mount.  TomTom also do permanent mounting kits which screw to the dashboard and can be hardwired.  Suction cups always have problems where they are mounted onto a cold screen and then when the screen warms up the residual air in the suction cup expands reducing the vacuum effect and loosing grip.

Richard 

[SaabKen]

Thanks Richard,

Not having read all 45  pages of this thread, I don't understand how a software upgrade (or lack thereof) affects GPS signal reception. I read something earlier about "supposed" issues relating to solar flares, leap year, etc etc. but reception is a physical event, no ?

Thx.

[Zsolt Elite Voyager]

@SaabKen: Apparently the firmware of the GPS receiver had a "leap-year bug" and went cuckoo. Whoever had/has problem with the GPS signal could see that there were even 7-11 satellites visible, just couldn't get a lock. When the devices were reset, the date went back to default (I think it is 01/01/2000) and could get a lock, until the next switch on. That's why we needed to reset all the time. The fixed TT software includes an updated GPS frimware as well, that fixes the leap-year bug.

[Papfox]

Hi Ken,

You are correct that receiving a radio signal is a physical process (radio waves hit antenna, get processed into digital signals)

That's when it becomes a software thing. One or more of the programs inside the Tomtom looks at this stream of data, decides if it is a real satellite (not just random noise) and then converts it into a set of numbers from which the math but can work out where you are.

If the validity checking or number converting software has a bug and incorrectly decides that those numbers aren't real satellites then you will get no "reception" (no real satellites found). When God devices talk about "reception" they actually mean "reception and decoding".

Cheers.

[Papfox]

"math bit" instead of "but".
GPS instead of God..

Curse you autocorrect!

I'm on my phone...

[richardski]

Hi Ken,

Papafox has covered it nicely,  On my 1005 World (not bragging just that it has a SDHC slot so software could be different) the satellite status screen just hung up.

Would have been interesting to do a bit of debugging of the Linux system but TomTom have gone out of their way to make connecting to it difficult  One reason to get one with an SDHC card slot as you can then introduce extra Linux code 

Richard

[SaabKen]

Thanks very much, gents, that really helped me to understand the issue and resolution to it.  Cheers.