GPS Location Reset

If you hunt around the forum here for instructions to get into the infotainment diagnostic screens, there should be one showing you what GPS satellites are being received, and with what signal strength. Perhaps there is an antenna issue and it is not getting a good signal?

 

Odds are great. Or that the GPS function is broken.

Setting a route and driving a bit should cause it to TELL you if it can't find the "birds".

 

Or will it maybe just say you're not in Kansas anymore?

 

I upgraded my Prius radio to a stock HD/GPS radio that I bought off of Ebay. The swap was really easy once I got the dash apart. Everything went great until I turned the Nav on and saw that the maps were all stuck in the Chicago/Joliet area. I live in Dayton Ohio, so I was concerned that I'd just spent 200 bucks to for slightly better radio reception. I messed with it for 2 hours, but couldn't figure it out. Suddenly, about 5 hours later, I was on the highway and it just found the signal out of the blue. It now works just fine. I guess that if you have issues like the GPS indicator being grayed out, don't jump to conclusions that your antenna is bad, or needs to be outside of the car, or needs to be mounted on the dash. It doesn't. Just be patient. It'll start working, eventually.

 

I remember the earliest GPS receivers I had, if turned off and taken far from where they last thought they were, could take a long, long, long time to get a new fix. They would have the satellite orbits baked in and know just where to look for the satellites expected to be in view from the expected location at the present time, but then they would have to fall back and figure out which ones they were able to see at all anywhere, and then determine a new position from that.

I'm pretty sure at least one old Garmin I had offered a way to shortcut that process by entering rough coordinates as a starting guess.

We're not used to that delay anymore with cell phones, which rely on so much additional information like cell towers and wifi hotspots and get much faster fixes.

 

Having this stale GPS location issue at the moment, after replacing a defective YY050 extension box.

 

I don't know about the post-refresh units with the extension box as much, but in my 2010 you can go to the infotainment diagnostic screens and one of them is the GPS status, and the screen looks just like my old Garmin where it lists which GPS satellites it has managed to locate, and what signal strength it has from each of them, and you can watch it discovering and trying different satellites, and as soon as it finds the right number of them with adequate signal strength, poof, the location updates.

It doesn't make the fix happen any faster, but it gives you something to watch while it's happening.

Or, if you see it not finding any satellites for a long time, or the signal strength really low, you can start to wonder if you've got an antenna problem or something.

 

Thanks. Signal seems fine, seeing 9 or 10 satellites (varies over time) with the Lat/Lon varying slightly every few seconds, placing the car in the Gulf Stream south of Long Island, NY. Guess the ephemeris is tuning up, but also need the map position (former owner apparently lived near Washington, DC) to sync up with the GPS Lat/Lon here on shore.