Further to this I drove yestereday without the charger plugged in but there was no improvement, the position was sometimes on the road, sometimes anywhere from 5m to maybe 100m off the road. Several times I had it lose GPS and announce ‘GPS signal lost’ on an open road with a good view of the sky, I’ve not had that before when plugged in. When I reached a town I spent 10 minutes trying to stick with the FP and got lost, I had to switch back to my old galaxy S2 to find my way.
I’d love some initial diagnosis on this GPS peformance is it software related? is it just a poor gps chip? I too would never have bought the phone had I know that the GPS was unusable for driving.
Hey,
I tried now the FP1-EPO-Autodownload from F-Drod for some days (but I can not say if it really speeds up the TimeToFirstFix, but anyway), but the app works like a charm - thanks for programming it!
But two questions still remain for me:
in which units is the “interval time”? Minutes or seconds? (Couldn’t find in documentations or by trial&error)
if I do a successful update of the EPO file:
why does my preferred App “GPS Status & Toolbox” ignore the update and still
shows the “AGPS Age = 4days”, although I just updated the EPO some
minutes before?
In contrast, in the Android settings under GPS the values for the new
EPO file are all correct (donwload time / starting time / expiring
time), the build-in auto-update is now disabled.
the interval time is in minutes, just like the built-in updater
Your app is talking about AGPS. That is an additional or alternative way to speed up time-to-first-fix. AGPS requiers that you have a data connection active. In Contrary, EPO uses pre-calculated positions of the GPS satellites. So, your app is showing the update data from AGPS, not EPO.
From my experience I can tell, that without an up-to-date EPO file i never got a fix at all (when not using AGPS). From that point of view, the FP1-EPO-Autodownload is a big help, however, time-to-first-fix may still be several minutes…
First of all, I would like to thank sn0b for FP1-EPO-Autodownload and encourage everyone who thinks GPS is broken to try it and give the FP some minutes time when outdoors for first fix. I write this because I was partly disappointed too about the GPS performance, but it seems more of a technology restriction than a FP1 issue.
You can find posts about all makes of devices, including outdoor GPS devices over the web, where users complain about offsets between the true position and the reported position of several hundreds of meters. I found no web page, though, giving a satisfactory explanation. But when one studies GPS design, enough aspects show up which can degrade the result, including multipath reception, varying signal strength etc. A receiver that is only 1/4 ‘chip’ (250ns) off the true signal timing makes 75 metres offset against the true distance from the resp. satellite.
I also experimented with these kitchen aluminium foil ‘GPS antennas’ and found out that I was able to degrade signal strength,but not significantly improve it. So the antenna seems to be well designed, too.
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.
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
Next time I’m going to walk in the wild I’ll try the top-of-the-bagpack idea, just to see…
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.
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…
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)
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.
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 Bluetooth works on Fairphone, so I would assume that such devices should work.
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
Bluetooth works on Fairphone, so I would assume that such devices should work.