Jon

Are you saying that even after installing an external antenna and attaching to 8410 you still get these problems?

If yes something else must be wrong  .. either 8410 is not processing antenna feed correctly or Skydemon is not interpreting correctly.

Either way its a pain and we shd try to sort it somehow. Don't know where to start though.

Any ideas? Tim what do you think is going on?

David

It's nothing to do with the hardware - it's just a bug in SkyDemon that's been there for a few versions and causes it to pop up "Seeking GPS Satellites" even though it also says "12/12 found" or even "12/11 found". The signal (with an external antenna) is well in tolerance, as reported by SkyDemon itself.

The "seeking GPS satellites" message appears when mean dilution of precision is worse than 15; a fairly poor fix.

oh dear! White Knight to Tim's rescue. Please don't blame SD for poor signal or CPU problems. I have found WinCE to be flacky in the past. I agree SirfStar III is a good chip but maybe the full signal strength is not getting through the BT interface? My unit is a Viliv X70 UMPC with integrated GPS and using the same software as you, I am not experiencing any signal dropout at all.

SkyDemon was never blamed for a poor raw signal, as obviously it would be incorrect to do so. There was the issue of SkyDemon ignoring data that it couldn't trust, effectively making the signal artificially worse by discarding potentially useful information, but there is now an option to disable this behaviour. However, as I said, an external antenna on the 8410 improves the GPS signal to the extent that the DoP is consistently in tolerance.