Database Info

gps testing, puzzling results

i went on a few drives today to test out my gps, the odd thing is i couldnt get it to misbehave in a significant way. i am using eugenes ginger clone and da_g's update.zip using his own jupiter.xml. i chose his control plane version. i also used some files from jj4 not because i thought they were better but because i was experimenting with the jm9 "FIX" files but wanted to revert back and grabbed the wrong ones from my computer.
my lbs test settings were:
Sesssion Type: tracking
Test Mode: s/w Test
Operation mode: Standalone
Start mode: Hot start
GPS Plus: OFF
Dynamic accuracy: OFF
accuracy: 50
Logging: OFF
supl settings:
server: supl.google.com
port: 7276
secure socket: off
agps mode: control plane
"use wireless networks" in setting>location and security, was not selected
i ran several my tracks trying to recreate the situation described by Da_g where the gps position jumps around and locks are lost when mytracks is in the foreground and lbs in the background but is accurate in the opposite situation. i wanted to see if any "fix" would help this situation, be it a modem file or gps library from other rom but could not create the unstable situation observed by others. this bugged me because i have had serious trouble with google maps acting erratically while all my stationary tests come out fine. the problem is i never used the gps on this rom and did not know if it suffers from this problem in the first place.
it appears this rom does not have that particular problem or the problem is not predictable or can not be caused at will.
i ran a few my tracks with jm9 files. the results were mediocre at best, did it help? nope
did it hurt? maybe, not sure but probably not.
then i ran the test with jj4 files. did it help? maybe but probably not, tests did appear slightly better but were not free of imperfections
did it hurt? nope
on each test i ran one my tracks with mytracks in the forground and lbs in the background then another with lbs in the foreground and my tracks in the background.
observation: phone did not lose gps signal upon starting any app or switching to any app like others reported. tracking results were too close to call. i used similar routes with clear skys and the accuracy was similar when compared on the same road. with lbs up front i could watch the reported accuracy, it mostly jumped from 10 to 30m occasionally hitting 5, and spending more time at 10. average was about 15meter accuracy.
then for s's and g's i ran my tracks behind maps navigation to see if navigation would aggravate the bad behavior. well it didn't. perfect results! this is both reassuring and disapointing. while i can be a little more confident in my gps which in the past has been good except when using google navigation it also make me wonder if maybe the gps is just plain unstable and cant be predicted.
did samsung get it right in the base rom that eugene worked from? did using control plane fix it? did i just get lucky today with different results tomorrow? does touchwiz somehow cause the problems(not likely but who knows)? eugene did a pretty good job of removing touchwiz from samsung sources, not true aosp but it would fool most.
did i stumble on a unique combination thus fixing my gps? im sure the answer is no. it is either in the control plane settings with da_g's mods or in the rom itself.
the jl3 modem seems to get a slightly better signal but is certainly not a "fix"
will you have similar results? dont know, try it. but be warned that the rom is giving me some funny battery reporting and the standard recalibration isnt really working. i also had some random shutdowns when i used juice defender(maybe a bad install on the app) it also is not likely to work with samsung widgets and the video player wont play those weird media hub files.
i do believe that axura was built off the same base rom (im really not sure about this, just a hunch) but i had no luck with gps on that rom, i didnt use axura long enough to try fixing it but others report it as being very good.
i wonder if anyone has looked into available ram as a cause? eugenes rom seems to have a small memory footprint and i often have over 200mb free! could minfree be killing a service when ram runs low? could a setting in other roms be killing a service when exiting some gps apps for the sake of ram/battery usage?
im not a dev and would have no idea where to start on this. i also know that much files that control gps are proprietary and cant be fixed by the community, we can only hope to identify the problem and employ a workaround to prevent problematic situations assuming that the proprietary files are infact more or less functional. will samsung employ a fix? well i think with the number of identified problems with the gps that the galaxy s was released prematurely. samsung likely rushed the release to get a bunch of ooohs and ahhhhs without doing enough testing. it appears that they are incrementally improving gps performance over several builds and it may continue to get better, maybe over several updates. untill then ill use eugenes rom. i also think that if froyo builds did not help you then you may have an antenna issue!
ill attach the my tracks file when i have time.
i would like to thank clshortfuse and especially Da_G for there efforts. Da_G i hope you find a solution that we can all use regardless of rom, or maybe you can cook up a rom yourself, people would definately use it..

[Q] GPS won't lock

All,
Hope you can help. I've been happily using my Desire S with GPS for a couple of years now, mostly on Reaper 3.0 this year and 4.0 since I came out, but also on other ROMs (Endy, Fallout, JellyTime). However at some point in the last few weeks (maybe while test flashing some recent CM10 builds) I no longer get a GPS lock. If I fire up GPS Test or Maps or whatever, the GPS icon keeps flashing, and I've left it for 20 mins at times. Occasionally I'll see some satellites in GPStest, so I know that my reciever works, but I never get a lock.
There are quite a few comments about this scattered across other threads and for other devices, so I've tried quite a few things..
- Used faster fix to set my NTP server to UK.
- Used GPS test to clear and download agps.
- Used Reaper Settings to apply AGPS fix.
- Restored stock gps.conf to the standard - seems to be the same across most ROMs,
- Then used GPS Test to reload aGPS again.
- then retried all of the above in different combinations.
- Flashed CM10 (both nk111 and Flinny), same behaviour.
At one point last week using GPS Test on Reaper 4.0 the icon stopped flashing and I apparently got a lock, but the accuracy was about 4000ft and didn't improve.
I know for other devices you can clear a partition to 'cold start' your GPS. Does such a process exist for the Desire S?
I'm wondering if I've got something cached on my SD card that's persistent across ROM flashes and is screwing my GPS. I've tried using Cachemate to clear everything I felt safe doing, but that didn't help either.
I guess I could format my SD card, but that sounds pretty scary to me and a lot of effort to restore all the stuff I've got on there. Especially as I don't really know if it would help.
Any suggestions?
Matt

It might be a case of bad antenna contact. HW, not SW. When something persists after factory reset - that's probably the case.

Jack_R1 said:
It might be a case of bad antenna contact. HW, not SW. When something persists after factory reset - that's probably the case.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Is that something I can get my local phone repair shop to look at - ie check connectors are seated etc? Or it is a fairly terminal resoldering type issue? Do you know?
Matt

Out of interest, My phone hes been running GPS Test on Reaper 4.0 now for the last 20 mins. It's seen 6 satellites at best all at a SNR of around 15-20, but still flashing the GPS icon and not locking.
Matt

6 satellites are very few.
It might be as simple as connectors issue.
The GPS antenna is on the top plastic, near the LED.

Have you tried this
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1442032
AGPS Patch Desire S 3.1 & 2.2 | GET BACK TO RAPID GPS LOCK, CAN LOCK ONTO MORE SATS
“Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.” – Erik Naggum

jugg1es said:
Have you tried this
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1442032
AGPS Patch Desire S 3.1 & 2.2 | GET BACK TO RAPID GPS LOCK, CAN LOCK ONTO MORE SATS
“Microsoft is not the answer. Microsoft is the question. NO is the answer.” – Erik Naggum
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I did look into that. I believe that's the same AGPS patch that Reaper Settings will apply, but I did try it independantly. It's just an updated /system/etc/gps.conf as far as I can tell. Didn't make any difference for me though.
Matt

So, I prised off the camera cover to reveal the Wifi and GPS antennas. Scuffed the contacts a bit with my thumbnail and lifted the spring contacts slightly to increase the contact pressure.
Popped the cover back on, replaced the battery, turned the phone back on, and voila! Loads of GPS reception. Loads of satellites. Very fast lock.
Pretty simple process too.
Thanks for your advice everyone.
Matt

[Q] navigation problem

I am running jellytime on my inspire. Its unable to do navigation with any app including google maps, and mapquest. It is able to find the route and locate me but cannot navigate. I have tried all available gps patched one by one, nothing fixes it. We have 2 Inspire handsets with jellytime, both have same issue. Can anyone help, please?

I'm running JellyTime and navigation is working fine. There was a bug from CM10 in which navigation app would loose GPS sync after screen timeout interval (even though screen does not go off in nav) and not come back. A workaround was to toggle GPS off and on without exiting nav. This bug seems to have been present in an earlier version of JellyTime per comments in the JellyTime thread, but RB reported it as fixed at some point, and I flashed the latest version and the bug went away. Do you have the latest JellyTime?
Also you should install GPS Test and/or GPS Monitor from the Play Store. These will tell you what your GPS status is, so you know if you have a GPS issue or apps using GPS are not working properly.

I do have the latest version of jellytime. Last night, i did a full wipe and installed the ROM all over again. Still getting the same issue. I am using GPS test. My issue is that my phone wouldn't lock to any satellites at all.

There are a few issues in the JellyTime issue tracker about GPS not working:
http://code.google.com/p/jellytime/...s+Priority+Milestone+Owner+Summary&cells=tile
This one seems to be the same as your problem, and there is a link to a fix that worked for the OP
http://code.google.com/p/jellytime/issues/detail?id=307&q=GPS

thanks for your reply. My problem is different. I do get the GPS icon in notification bar, its just not able to connect to the satellites. I tried the fix anyway. Didnt work.

BREAKING NEWS: (lol)
I was able to fix the issue. Here is the list of things I did: (dont really know which one worked)
I did a complete cache and davlik wipe and installed the ROM (still using jellytime 42 R6.1)
Restarted the phone and the installed inspiremod from HERE
I took the GPS antenna off and cleaned the connections (THIS guide helped)
Then I installed the inspiremod + gps from HERE
And it worked!! Now I am getting a GPS fix as quick as 15 sec..

Glad to hear it's working. I imagine cleaning the antenna connections could have been part of the problem or the entire problem. But it would be nice to know if the GPS fix included in the second Inspiremod you linked to is included in the first Inspiremod, which is the one one linked at the beginning of the JellyTime thread.. The first one says it has GPS configured for North America. Are you elsewhere?

Even after cleaning the antenna connection I wasn't getting any GPS lock untill I did the inspiremod with GPS. And, GPS fix is not included in the inspiremod only that I posted a link for in post # 6 above.

[Q] The GPS is driving me nuts...

To begin with, I got my phone rooted with CM10 on it - I don't remember how well (or if at all) the GPS worked under that one, because I found it laggy as all crap. I went back to Gingerbread and have LOVED the increased responsiveness, but the GPS is now flaky as all-git-out.
Here is what I have tried:
Old baseband plus...
Eagle's Blood
CM7 7.2 "Stable"
CM7 7.2 Latest nightly (2013 march something, iirc)
I dropped it back to stock and let it update to the new baseband, then...
CM7.2 Latest nightly (ye gods that sounded awful. Oh, and the GPS didn't work.)
HellFire Phoenix reborn/reloaded/whatever the latest one was - I followed all of the "THIS ONE IS DEPRECATED, FOLLOW THIS LINK INSTEAD" links.
I have used the following kernels, more or less randomly, in addition to the ones that came wrapped into each ROM...
MazKrnl v1.0 rc2
Trinity T15
Trinity ELP
MazKrnl and ELP gave me sleeps of death in addition to the GPS not working.
Now, my first GPS lock after loading HFP (my latest ROM - and I am just trying T15 with it as I type this) took about five seconds and held solid. I was SO FREAKING HAPPY! But that was yesterday.
This morning, according to "GPS Toolbox" it can see anywhere from 9-11 satellites - and has a lock on all of them - but won't give me coordinates at all. This is true even after about 30 minutes sitting by a 7th-floor window.
IT'S MADDENING.
I've been googling. I tried messing with the GPS.CONF file, adding and replacing north-america ntp servers. I've tried downloading and re-downloading AGPS info from the GPS toolbox app. I flashed the "for_old_bb.zip" that I found somewhere - even though that's supposed to only affect audio - and GOOD LORD THAT WAS A MISTAKE, given that I'm now on the new bb. (The "new_baseband.zip" which is its alternative seems to have vanished utterly from the internet, sigh.) So yes, I'm down to grasping at straws.
Did I mention the maddening part?
I'm aiming to put together a for-real, once-and-for-all solution to the GPS issues here, because everywhere else it's 2-3 years old and nothing referenced anywhere has worked for me. I know this phone is a little long in the tooth, and dev has basically stopped, but am I really the only one still in this boat?
Thanks - seriously - for ANY help with this.

Update:
T15 kernel (?) caused a sleep of death over lunch.
Completely eliminating the GPS info (App "GPS Status & Toolbox" -> Settings -> Reset) and letting it sit with no internet access for oh, about an HOUR led to a post-reboot fix in a reasonable amount of time.
Oh, also I removed the "SUPL" info - per this post.
Of course, then my battery was wasted, so I'm recharging to test again later.
Honestly people - is this phone worth it? I only "upgraded" from my HTC Thunderbolt for the 4G - which, I admit, is nice when I'm not on wifi...

This phone has always had GPS issues.
The last baseband helped a bit, but it was never fully resolved.
I still use this phone, and still use the GPS on it nearly daily for tracking my hikes and bike rides.
My steps:
Run GPS Test.
If locked, great, done.
If not, wait about 10-15 seconds.
If it doesn't lock within that time, it will never lock without a reboot, no matter how long you wait.
Reboot.
Run GPS Test again.
<Repeat the above steps>
Generally I have noticed that 95% of the time, that a lock will happen after a reboot.
The other 5% of the time, you will have to reboot again.
The other annoyance for me is that during runtime, while you are using the GPS, it will just lose lock.
If that happens, you are toast. It will never come back without a reboot.
I don't even bother waiting, hoping it will come back.
As soon as it loses lock, I do a reboot.
On reboot, it generally locks right away again.

Gps problems

Hello, I have a strange problem. Every day or two gps is turning on by itself to high accuracy. I never use gps at all, have disable all options for gps and opted off all permissions for apps who can use gps but this still happens. I am running latest official eu rom. Also did not notice it before two latest updates (so mainly it started in android 9 update). Any help?