Comand finding satellites

[wobbly]

The Comand in my ML is taking its time to find any satellites.

The Comand was a retro fit about six years ago and worked fine until a couple of weeks ago, then it would take from 5 to 20 minutes of starting the car to register any satellites.( so if I'm not on a marked road, the system gets lost)

When it has registered it picks up between 6 and 10, so I don't think it's the antenna, but in have fitted a new one just in case, but this has made no difference.

Any ideas what could be the problem.

 

[st13phil]

Slow satellite acquisition is normally either a problem with the antenna, or the device's almanac is out of date or corrupt. You seem to have eliminated the antenna as an issue.

The almanac is a lookup table that identifies where the satellite constellation will be on a particular date and time and is used so that the GPSR doesn't have to scan the entire sky to locate the satellites, instead just "looking" where it expects to find them. The fact that your unit does actually find the satellites eventually would suggest that it's doing a full sky scan to find them.

One obvious question: is the date and time correctly set on the unit? If not then it's using the wrong almanac data and won't find the satellites where it expects to.

I have no idea how to get a COMAND unit to rebuild its almanac, but perhaps disconnecting the supply to it would force a reset? Richard will probably know.

 

[wobbly]

Phil,

Thanks for the thoughts on my problem.

From what I believe, the date and time is set via a GPS signal, the date and time were correct, so may not be the issue.

I also tried disconnecting the powers supply, and also reset the system via the services settings, but nothing has changed.

 

[st13phil]

Well that's exhausted all the ideas I have! You could try contacting Richard or Alfie at COMANDonline.