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.

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.

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

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.

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

This is a problem I see quite a bit also. If the data is good enough to plot my location then I'd prefer not to see this message at all as it takes up too much room. A change to an icon on the bottom left would be better.

We'll include an option to turn off the requirement for a precise fix in today's beta, see how you get on. It'll be in GPS Setup.

I have a feeling something more fundamental is going on re SD & satellite fix.

I flew for around 2hrs todat Sunday. 8419 worked fine except for the last 15 mins or so. Started to "lose" fix and said(pretty often) it was refixing with the alert across the screen (which you don't seem to be able to turn off). Final straw was when it said it had a fix on 12 sats and could see 12 sats but was seeking a fix!!

Not sure if this relevant but it seems to be related (coincident with) redrawing the map  .. esp if you change direction by say 90 degrees. Perhaps if you zoom as well. Its as if its processing is getting clogged up. Cd be nonsense though.

I did look at GPS output and the accuracy data was all OK expt the last figure was around 20.

Where is the gps log saved to? have not looked yet. If its being saved to the SD card OK. Since this is a WinCE hack if its being saved to the internal memory, this cd be a problem.

Anyway when it works its great but its still too flaky to rely on.

Will dig some more but I think we need some feedback from as many people using SD Mobile, in flight for real as possible.

Wd like to avoid another antenna but looking like I will have to try one and see what difference it makes. But I am sceptical as this unit is a fairly high end car nav device and claims to have "SiRF Star III + SiRF InstantFix II / Built-in". So wd not expect poor gps performance.

Any ideas very welcome.

D
PS liked the "current leg logic" which worked fine.

I appreciate it is a different problem to that INITIALLY raised, but I was adding to the information posted in posts 854 and 855 in this thread about the GPS feed to SD-Mob.



MFC

When signal becomes poor and the GPS chipset is reporting some doubt about your position/speed/altitude/heading, SkyDemon will not use the data. Memory Map will. SkyDemon is designed for aviation navigation, Memory Map is designed for displaying any kind of map without specific regard to accuracy.

As mentioned, we're considering adding an "opt-in" feature that will allow users to bypass the accuracy filters.