CF-30 GPS Question

Okay... I am rebuilding my personal CF-30 to put up on eBay. I had a good license for W7 Ultimate and installed the OS and drivers on a new 250GB Samsung SSD. Everything went well until it came time to load the GPS Patch. It didn't want to seem to take and the Serial Ballpoint was bouncing the pointer everywhere. I disabled the SB and the GPS reception seemed spotty at best. (Yes I disabled the GPS in the BIOS first.)

I tried reloading a GPS Patch that I had stored on my server instead of the ones I was downloading (CF-30 MK3) from the Panny website.

Before I reinstalled the OS the GPS was working great. It is the OEM GPS and while not spectacular... It is probably the best Panny OEM GPS I have seen yet.

So... Now I do not see the serial ballpoint in the Device Manager and the GPS is flaky at best, locking on only 3 satellites with others popping in for less than a second before disappearing. This reminds me of the CF-28 days!

I used to be able to get at least 5-6 sats inside my house... Now it is on the deck and I get 3 only... If I take it inside it loses all of them.


Any ideas? I tried several GPS patches... Might I have messed up Registry settings?

Thoughts?

 

I'll add that the GPS seems to jump around similar to what the mouse pointer does prior to the GPS patch...

 

Has anyone been able to find any spec sheets for the Sony engine used on the OEM units?
It might be nice to see what can be changed to stabilize and stop the jump.
I have found that you can do a cold reset with WinFast Navigator, but it doesn't seem to do anything but just reset.
Once reset it continues to jump.

 

Sony GXB5005

http://datasheet.eeworld.com.cn/pdf/SONY/37031_GXB5005.pdf

 

Thank you very much

 

Serial ballpoint as in mouse type thingy?
Unplug / remove everything except what's necessary, EVEN THE GPS, Plug things in one at a time. I would start with reconnecting the gps...
See if it works ok. I am guessing that there is a port sharing issue. Sometimes disabling a device in the bios DOES NOT prevent windoze from still seeing the disabled device. I disable bluetooth in the bios and windoze sees the device as disabled....It MAY still commit a port to the device..Not sure.
If the gps is ok then start one device at a time until it goes wacky again.
You may need to reinstall windoze without any extras or gps installed. Then install the devices one at a time so not to confuse windoze.

Welcome to the forum..

 

I bought a GPS setup off the bay and got a Leadtek LR9548S. It works great. I have the parts to install a sma external gps antenna port in the cf30. Then the roof MobileMark 3 band antenna...GPS/WIFI/CELLULAR..

How does the Leadtek compare to the Sony?

 

Rick! Did you try setting the bios into default. Upon doing that disable first the gps on the bios.

ohlip

 

Teo,

Yes.... I reset it... Though Shawn has me thinking about a possible port conflict.

Presently... The GPS will lock for a split second (or try to) and then lose all connectivity. The pulse is about once per second.

I will try removing the AT&T WWAN and trying it all again. Though at this point I am starting to think that I tried too many GPS patches and may have screwed the pooch with the registry...

EDIT: okay... So I removed the WWAN and it seems to have picked up 1-2 more sats... But it is still flashing. I am wondering if I should reload the OS from scratch again. This thing was working flawlessly prior to installing the SSD and a fresh load of W7...

 

OK,

Its 6 months later.... What was the outcome? I am having the exact same issue with the device resetting so I am very curious if there was a resolution.

 

The problem is the wire leading to the antenna. I took it all apart and ran the GPS with the antenna loose and it worked. I then remounted the antenna and put the wire in the lid but left under the keyboard loose. Still worked. I then finished routing the wire and put the cover on under the keyboard. It quit working. Guess I'll be looking into after market antennas.

 

I had the same issue with my CF30MK3, I bought an OEM GPS replacement from Ebay and it would only pick up 3 satellites. When I used Hyperterm to listen to the port it was seeing, then forgetting, then seeing only 3.

After mounting my laptop in my truck and leaving it on and tracking for an hour, then driving 3 to Edmonton from Calgary the GPS was able to re-calibrate and I have had no issues! (Well other than the wrong WWAN card, but thats a different thread)

 

I just ran into the same issue again on another build. My fix was to just disable the serial ballpoint in Device Manager. It is weird that sometimes the GPS patch fix works about half the time... The other times it tells me that it will not load. I have yet to find a driver that works 100% of the time on MK1 CF-30s when loading W7.

 

Did you try direct from the Synaptics site?

 

Um... No sir... I did not...