GPS’ing
Rather unexpectedly, my new Bluetooth GPS unit arrived yesterday - I’d only just bid for the thing on Sunday afternoon, and It was delivered to my door 9am Tuesday - now how is that for speedy service?
I had the box ripped open in no time, and there inside was this dinky little GPS receiver. I had it paired to my iPAQ 4150 in no time, and using WiFiFoFum which I already had installed, was getting GPS coordinates returned. After that initial half an hour, things took a turn for the worse. Like most new things they never seem to go as smoothly as I would like…
The kit came with a USB power cable that can charge the unit and the PDA at the same time. I plugged this into the power adapter, which was non-UK for some reason, and that into a UK adapter (also provided in the kit!). After about 10 minutes or so, I heard a pop sound come from under the desk. I thought that Harvey had knocked something, as he frequently sits there, but he was still. I noticed that the red LED on the power adapter had gone out. After a bit of wiggling, there was no sign of life - I guess that something had blown in the adapter. Neither the PDA or GPS unit were charging! S***!
From then on - the GPS unit just would not talk to my PDA… It was getting satellite signals, and I could pair my PDA to it using Bluetooth, but I just could not get any signal from it. I tried powering off the GPS unit, removing the battery for a minute, powering down my PDA, removing it’s battery. I even resorted to hard resetting the PDA (ouch!), all to no avail…
I checked out numerous forums to see if there was perhaps some incompatibility with the unit and my iPAQ. I installed numerous bits of software to see if I could get data from the unit.. I was beginning to wonder if the adapter ‘blowing’ had affected the unit.
Time seemed to fly-past, I seemed to be getting nowhere fast.. and before I knew it, it was 1am!! Time to give up and go to bed.
Trying again this morning, in the hope that it would suddenly start working, failed to produce the results that I was hoping for… and I was really starting to feel the worse - that the unit was knackered?
Then after reading a response to my plight in a forum posting, with the instruction of removing the GPS battery for 5 minutes, I gave this a go - and guess what - IT WORKED!!! Obviously the removal of about a minute was not long enough for the device to ‘reset’ and it is now working like a dream.
No I need to install some Navigational Software and make the most out of this baby. That’s tonight task….
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