GPS could not find or keep signal

[Tin Cup]

Last Sunday, I went out for the afternoon in Narraganset Bay. Light wind, heavy clouds and periods of rain from the hurricane that had just blown east of us, beautiful fishing weather. Upon launching, my GPS (Garmin 2006C) could not pick up the satellites. I checked the wires then rebooted and rebooted. On the first reboot, it found the satellites and then lost the signal. Then upon every following reboot, the GPS dropped the signal after differing lengths of time, about 7-8 times. Then it just worked fine :D

Anyone experience this before or have a theory as to what was going on? Its not the wires.

Thanks,

Eric

[peterbo3]

TC ( or are you really Kevin Costner ),
I have had several GPS units & rain, cloud or darkness never fazed them. I am thinking your problems may be voltage related.
Modern GPS/Plotter systems like the right amount of volts. They will drop out if the voltage drops (Pun intended). Did you run your motor for a period before the signal stabilized? Are you running off a dedicated house battery?
Electrical faults do not tend to repair themselves so you must look at other things & eliminate them one by one. You checked your wiring & connections.....all was good. The unit worked eventually......scratch that off. All that is left is power supply. Can you put a multimeter on your battery to check it? I am am betting that is the problem.

[Tin Cup]

Interesting, I'll check it out. Yes it worked fine after a period of 20 min or so.

I run everything on the boat with 2 batteries via a battery selector switch, pretty standard set-up I think. Everything is not much; gps/sounder, vhf, motor and hydraulics, lights and horn.

Thanks,

Eric

PS I'm no golfer, it interferes with boating and fishing 8)

[welder]

If the batts are in good shape and the Ant. is in good shape it's got to be a connection and probably the Ground.

[Tin Cup]

The mystery continues, I put a meter on both batteries, they are perfectly charged. I checked all the connections again, everything is tight and clean. The GPS turned on and worked perfectly. I also checked the power requirement spec on my GPS unit, 10-32VDC input, this to me rules out a power supply issue.

Hopefully my problem from last Sunday was just an aberration :?

[21ftcc]

TinCup, It may have been due to signal delays caused by the atmosphere and ionosphere. and/or bad connections ie ground.

Also what version GPS software are you running? Its "sometimes" a good idea to keep up to date.

By the way I use GPS survey equipment full time for my job and there where at most 14 sats over the Bay on sat and sun, you only need 4 for a good fix on navational gps units.

[Tin Cup]

Interesting, thanks. Some sort of atmospheric interference seems reasonable since I have never had problem before and seems to be working perfectly now and I could find nothing wrong. Its an isolated one time incident so far.

[warthog5]

Also what version GPS software are you running?

BINGO! That is the most common problem. Upload the latest software version from Garmin. I too have a 2006C.

I once lost all the buoys on the chart. A software upgrade brought them right back.

Latest version is Ver. 5.80 as of May 10, 2007

https://buy.garmin.com/shop/store/downl ... 68&pID=171

[Bob5292]

The update should do the trick. There are a bunch of people complaining about the same problem over here. The issue seems to stem from the WASS parameters. If you turn off WASS, it should work fine until you get the software updates.

Bob

[capeannfisherman]

I have had the same troubles with mine. On mine it turned out to be moisture in the gps antenna mounted on the t-top. now I keep a plastic bag wrapped around the antenna and no problems. I really should replace the antenna.
Adrian

[21ftcc]

What type of external antenna do you have?

[capeannfisherman]

I think most of them are all the same. The GPS is acctually in the antenna itself and the chartplotter is just the screen on which the information is diplayed. Mine is by sitex, but I think they all work the same unless you have a seperate GPS system.

[21ftcc]

This is the basic setup up of a external GPS antenna. This shows you how to make one, but if you opened yours up you would find something like this.

http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/pdf/0210036.pdf

[Occams Razor]

Hello All:

I had this very same problem in Narragansette bay myself with my Lowrance LCX 112. I thought it was was a power issue myself so I verified. No problem , cheched connections for noise (AC) and verified voltage drop at ground. I had to pull my Navionacics card to get it to knock it off. Booted it up on the Lowrance program and it worked fine . Them I put the Navionics card back in and it took. I did notice some crazy stuff going on with the GPS unit when I was going past a Perry class destroyer in the bay recently also . I assume they had some local jamming device going. Not supposed to be within 500 yards of one of those war boats but he was not far off the channel so I know I within 300 yards. Lobsta boat woking the area too so I did not worry. But I have had the same thing happen to me in the bay.

[Tin Cup]

Interesting. I have experienced the problem only the one time.