Sunday, June 28, 2009

Testing the GPS

The quality of the built in GPS receiver in the G1 has been kind of a let down. This past weekend I was helping pick up trash along a highway and decided to leave My Tracks going while walking up and down the highway. The first complaint was the time to fix, it seemed like something around 3 minutes(definetely worse than the 75 seconds in the spec) , on a perfectly clear day while standing out in the open. Using the GPS Status 2 app it would report 6 satellites quickly but still take forever to get an actual location fix.

The second issue was the quality of the GPS signal after I put the phone in my pocket, the location would somtimes jump around 5-10 meters at a time. This is fine for just locating yourself on a street, but when walking up and down a road it makes the distance measured meaningless. It really doesn't hold a candle to a dedicated SIRFStar 3 USB GPS unit. Although it would do better if it had been mounted with a fixed view of the sky rather than in my pocket. I'm not sure if the hard plastic shell I put on the phone cuts down on GPS reception or not.

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