GPS Monitor

Thought I broke my phone t'other night. Hard reset fixed it; or so I thought because it did it again today...

When toggling through the screens with Touch UI enabled I get 3 screens.
The standard screen showing and arrow and distance to cache and the following info in the top left.
1.2km to cache.
9 degrees, not sure what that is, possibly a bearing.

Toggle and I get an overview of the satellites and I get the same info as above.

If I toggle again the info in the top left goes all doolally...
91.5km to cache.
271 degrees, now I'm really confused...

On Monday night it showed 483km, so it's getting closer.

Is this a feature or a bug.

PS To avoid getting flamed I'm running ver 49 on a HTC Touch 2 and I haven't cleared my DB.

Flamed? On this forum? Never

I too have experienced what you have described. Open the monitor and I am suddenly hundres of miles from the cache.

A soft reset of the phone usually clears the fault and I'm back to normal.

Sometimes it will do it several times in a couple of days, then it will go for ages without a problem.

I don't think it is a GCzII issue, I think it has to do with the phone handling the data from the GPS unit.

Oddly my Tomtom did a similar thing once. There I was driving along the A38 in cornwall, next minute I was in the English channel just off the French coast !
I reset the tomtom and all went back to normal.

Would be interested to hear if anyone else has had this problem as I had always just put it down to my phone having 'data problems', but maybe it's a more common issue.

I have an HTC HD2 by the way.

ps. The 9 degrees that you see is the bearing of the cache from your current course. It's going to vary as you meander your way to the cache avoiding obstacles on the way.

I have had this problem a few times with my Dell Axim using both Holux and US Globalsat CF GPS receivers... It seems to get East and West mixed up for some reason, I actually noticed that my -XX.XXXXX degrees became XX.XXXXX degrees. I exited the application and restarted the software without rebooting and it still did it so I opened a few other mapping and geocaching applications and they all gave the same result and said I was in Mongolia and not the upper mid-west of the US. Pulling the CF GPSr cards and re-inserting them still lead to the same issue, only a reset of the device fixed it.

All the above leads me to believe this is a Windows Mobile issue and not a software or hardware issue, also I do not recall this ever happening with WM5, only after I upgraded to 6.0 or higher (6.0, 6.1, 6.5, and 6.5.3 all seem to have similar issues off and on, at least for me).

Take it for what it is worth, but Windows Mobile is still Microsoft Windows, and it takes a reset every once in awhile to keep things working properly.

PaulLoft wrote:I don't think it is a GCzII issue, I think it has to do with the phone handling the data from the GPS unit.

Good to know I'm not the only one but I think it only happens on one screen.
However, when I did have the problem first time, GateCacher gave the same symptoms.

tmax wrote:
Good to know I'm not the only one but I think it only happens on one screen.
However, when I did have the problem first time, GateCacher gave the same symptoms.

So when it happens, do you mean you can get it back correct by toggling through the screens?
One of the radar screens shows the distance correctly and another view doesn't?

Which screen shows the correct distance information?

PaulLoft wrote:

tmax wrote:
Good to know I'm not the only one but I think it only happens on one screen.
However, when I did have the problem first time, GateCacher gave the same symptoms.

So when it happens, do you mean you can get it back correct by toggling through the screens?
One of the radar screens shows the distance correctly and another view doesn't?

Correct.

PaulLoft wrote:Which screen shows the correct distance information?

I'll have a play at dinner-time.
I'll see if leaving GCz on a certain page affects GateCacher. If so, could be a GCz bug.

tmax wrote:I'll see if leaving GCz on a certain page affects GateCacher. If so, could be a GCz bug.

Never mind getting flamed, you could get shot for making such a suggestion

Didn't go out today, it's raining.
Did a quick check while stood by the window.

Today we have
Satellite screen
Top left
6.3km
86DEG

Bottom left
30DEG

Navigation screen
Top left
6.3km
86DEG

Bottom left
2.5km

Navigation screen
Top left
93.9km
271DEG

Bottom left
+250m

It was 271deg t'other day too.....

Couldn't get it to effect GateCacher tho'

PS My location is approx. 52 0.800 W0 38.300. Where is 94km at a bearing of 271DEG ?

From the FAQ/Helpful Hints:

P5x5-User wrote:The Radar screen allows you to easy get satellite or target info:
At first you should activate Menu/Touch/On, otherwise the whole screen will only work as switch for Target/Sat Info overlay.
Now it is possible to select the three modes by tapping the top reception bars. Each tap toggles Menu/View between Tracking (direction to target), Average Trace (same, but with averaged positions) and Satellites (Sky view).
In each mode the main Radar also has different touch capabilities:

1. Tracking mode
   Green Arrow is North, Yellow dot is Sun, Red dot is target.
   Red arrow is direction to target, Blue is your heading.
   The blue disc in the middle shows the estimated precision of the GPS, it can also be seen in the bottom right corner.
   The top left numbers are distance and heading of target, top right are speed and heading of movement.
   A blue line may be visible, it shows the path you went. You may change the length of the path via menu/path.
   Bottom left shows scale for each ring of the radar, "M" is for manual scale, "A" means scale is adjusted automatically.
   By tapping the bottom right quadrant, you can switch between Manual and Auto.
   The top right quadrant toggles Sat and Target info overlay on/off.
   If on manual scale, tapping left top or bottom quadrants will increase or decrease the scale factor.
   
2. Average trace mode
   Most controls and displays are as in the standard Tracking mode, except that you will see a lot of small crosses, each representing one position of the GPS.
   GCzII will average the shown positions and show this as the blue dot. This will give better results when reception is poor.
   A tap on the bottom right will reset all crosses, restarting the averaging process.
   
3. Satellites View
   This one is just to show you how much satellites you 'see' and where they are.
   Blue dots show satellites in use, grey are not used. The numbers inside are the so called "Space Vehicle Number".
   The only working quadrant here is top right.
   

Other options only available in the menu:

• You may switch the radar from "Heading top" to "North top".
  
• You may switch Day/Night-View.
  

I think that the "Mode 2 Average Trace Mode" has a bug. I think it may only work in the E hemisphere or somehting. Whenever I use it it reads something like 10,000km. Try tapping the bottom right to reset it, may work...

Andronicus wrote:I think that the "Mode 2 Average Trace Mode" has a bug. I think it may only work in the E hemisphere or somehting. Whenever I use it it reads something like 10,000km. Try tapping the bottom right to reset it, may work...

Tapping bottom right reset the number to zero; then it went doolally again.

Be handy if we had a Manual

I may try and scrape all the info into a PDF.

tmax wrote:

Andronicus wrote:I think that the "Mode 2 Average Trace Mode" has a bug. I think it may only work in the E hemisphere or somehting. Whenever I use it it reads something like 10,000km. Try tapping the bottom right to reset it, may work...

Tapping bottom right reset the number to zero; then it went doolally again.

That is how it works for me too. I am prety sure it is a bug. Sometimes developers can't test things like that because they are at a fixed location on the earth. In the past when Tom had more time to work on this, he would get people to record the GPS data, then he could use that to simulate the insident. Early on, GCz (before the II was added) had an issue were in the Western Hemasphere the E/W vector on the radar screen was reversed (ie instead of NE it would show NW etc.).