Forum: Weblog comments

I haven't done any studies to find out the strength of this effect, but I find that just standing still with a GPS unit until it gets its initial fix makes it go faster. The distance you've traveled before turning it on, though, makes a huge difference: it's a lot faster to grab the satellites when I'm 10 miles from home than when I'm on the other side of the Equator...

For an improved GPS initial fix, you might look into integration and caching of orbit ephemeris files. Afaik, these files contain very precise satellite orbit information for the next few days, and act as "hints" to get the fix faster. On HTC devices, the program handling these files is provided with the device and is called QuickGPS (google for quickgps htc) and it is scheduled to start on a weekly schedule for example to download the updates. No idea if there's an equivalent on Nokia, but more information on the orbit survey internals and files are available on http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/orbits/ or http://www.geod.nrcan.gc.ca/products-produits/eph_e.php for example...
Oh, and yes, as already said, most GPS assume they restart where they were last turned off, so if you move in between, initial fix time will be much worse.
Happy gps'ing !

Nice to see you like the N810. I have a Nokia N800 and found it very exciting (specially after they released their Mozilla Minimo browser ... I hated Opera).

HOWEVER, how do you manage with Battery Life on the N810?. Is there an easy way to shut off the GPS receiver (which, I imagine, drains battery fast) ?.

FC

The GPS receiver is only on when some software is accessing it, so it only drains battery when mapping software or such is running.