GPS does not work

Sorry if someone else suggested the same thing before.
When I read about GPS scamblers/disrupters on the web, I thought that you might operate another device close to the receiver, which radiates in the 0…1MHz frequency band. This might be the car radio or another electronic device which is maybe defective or poorly designed. The GPS receiver basically creates kinda pseudo noise sequences at a 1MHz rate and autocorrelates this with the antenna noise to find the satellites’ signals in the noise. Obviously, third party noise makes this much harder.

It’s really sad that the gps is working so poorly, I can not track my runs and the navigation is really annoying.

I have tried the suggestions of Robin but unfortunately I can not download the EPO files…

Now I’m thinking to buy a GPS for the car and one for running…

My experience is only with OsmAnd, but with this app

  • definitely car navigation is absolutely OK, without any change in the original GPS handling (no “better GPS”, nothing like that).
    I’d call it operational and I do rely on it.

  • tracks recording, OTOH, brings quite erratic pathes, which are unusable to update Openstreetmap for instance. Dozens and dozens m errors.
    This may be because of the way I’m pocketing the thing (in an horizontal pouch on my belt: I don’t walk with the FP in hand nor nicely located in a backpack top for instance)

I’d call the GPS chip an average one no more, with a relatively slow convergence and handling never more than 12 sats.

But it does replace my car GPS, and with free and always-updated OSM maps -and now not having this would be terrible :slight_smile:

Next time I’m going to walk in the wild I’ll try the top-of-the-bagpack idea, just to see…

Hello,

i really like the whole concept and everything around and i really like my FP, but my GPS is not working at all. I am not that nerdy, that i want to try to fix it on my own… is there a chance that this problem will be fixed in the future?
Is it possible to change the GPS chip ?

I am not doing a lot with my phone, besides navigating and running. For that I really need GPS.

What do you think @Robin? Otherwise i sell it again and wait for FP2?

Hmm, my GPS sometimes works very well, other times it doesn’t work at all. I actually believe that this is a software issue (with the A-GPS data etc.) and this can be fixed. I hope this gets fixed in the next Fairphone software update as it has been reported to the support team.

interesting, mine is quite unusable for navigation and I always end up falling back to my old galaxy S2 which was a perfect SatNav replacement. Next time I am doing a reasonable length drive I’m going to see if I can get some video of both phones navigating at the same time.

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I downloaded the file using total commander which may have longer timeout waiting for connection,
so chance to get the file seems much better.
But I didn’t find /data/misc to store it there.
I’ve got the second batch FP1.
Later - after maybe 50 retries - my FP1 got the EPO file with manual download itself,
but I cannat find any file named EPO.DAT or EPO.*.

My FP1 is working now without current valid EPO data, but I assume, that fixing the location will slower and slower
the older the EPO file is. So I would accept, downloading EPO.DAT manual by total commander … if I know where to store it at my FP1…

Why do you want to go the hard way? :wink:

This guy:
https://forum.fairphone.com/users/sn0b/activity

Wrote this program:
https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=Fp1&fdid=de.b0nk.fp1_epo_autoupdate

Its the easyest way I know, to update your EPO-Files!

You only need to:
Allow SuperUser
& REMOVE the check mark under “Settings > Location > GPS > EPO > Auto-Download”
& configure the program the way you want (not necessary)

This program is already mentioned in this thread!

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I’m thinking of buying a FairPhone, but … GPS is the most important to me.

So I’m worried about it after reading this topic. It remembers me with the recurring GPS-problems I had with my Nokia 5800 Expresmusic, very similar. On the other hand the GPS in my Nokia N8 works like a charm.

“Ben” tested the Nokia Here software (see Future Android version for the Fairphone 1 / 1U), slow (maybe Android 4.2 related ?) but working.

Leaves me with two questions :

  • will FP release a new firmware with the GPS-issues mentionned in this topic fixed ?
  • is it possible to use an external GPS-receiver via bluetooth ?

Hi @wquatan

Your first question isn’t quite easy to answer. As this bug has been reported a lot, I assume this is one of the number one priorities on the to-do list over at Fairphone. Let’s just hope it is a software-related problem and nothing hardware related. So I can’t really give you a conclusive answer about that.

Second question, do you have any examples of such external bluetooth receivers, as I have never heard of those :smiley: Bluetooth works on Fairphone, so I would assume that such devices should work.

Die korrekte nummer ist:
The correct number is:

*#*#3646633#*#*

[Edited by Moderator: Updated the formatting of the number so it displays correctly]

Wow!
I was struggling several months with my FP1, trying to fix the GPS-Problem - without any success!
This is the first work around that really works out!! Thank you!
But martinv2 added the final very important puzzle piece referring the phone code:

Da hat die Foren-Formattierung zugeschlagen; die Zeichenfolge muss *#*#3646633#*#* heissen

[quote=“erv, post:77, topic:359”] *#*#3646633#*#*

[/quote]

When you dial this is launches “engineering mode”, the forum software is making the number appear incorrectly in the original post. I will update.

I’m using an Nokia LD-3W

A way to fix the the problem is written and documented on
http://fix-my-gps.blogspot.de.

Best regards
Bobby

Very disappointed ! I will change phone soon. If someone want to buy this contact me. Ste.tedeschi@gmail.com. ciao
PS fp1 1month old with cover.
GPS working now and then…

Did you try the following:
Go to ‘System settings’ (the button far left below on your Fairphone).
Tap on 'Location access’
Make sure that ‘GPS satellites’ are 'on’
Tap on the word 'GPS satellites’
Make sure that the box after ‘GPS EPO assistance’ is ticked on
Tap on ‘EPO settings’ and leave the box after ‘Auto download’ empty.
Make sure that the box after ‘A-GPS’ is ticked on
Tap on ‘A-GPS settings’ and only tick the box after ‘Network Request’ to on.
Reboot your Fairphone.
Now download F-Droid , here you can get apps which are Free and Open Source Software.
Then download FP1-EPO-Autoupdate
After the download run the FP1-EPO-Autoupdate and give it permanent Root access.

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For short journeys I don’t plug it in and it makes no difference for me. Still hopping on and off the road (even if it’s a motorway) and dreadful accuracy :frowning:

I do not have Google Maps and instead use µg Unified Nlp with OSMand~ (both from F-Droid) and I got really surprised, when I was going by train and GPS showed my exact position on the rails. :smiley: