GPS lost signal - weird

I was driving on the highway
in the western burbs of Chicago
with my Garmin Nuvi 255...

All of a sudden, the screen showed loss of satellite signal.
I was driving on the tollway - out in the open -
Flipped to the main screen, and the sat signal meter showed nothing !
It stayed that way all the way home - about 30mins -
Turned it off, back on and it took a little while,
back gradually came back to life with full bars.

In all my years of using Garmin devices,
I've never seen that happen...

--
----------------------------------
"If everything seems to be going well,
you have obviously overlooked something." - Steven Wright

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:16:05 -0500, "ps56k"


I've seen similar things with other GPS units. When I see something
like that I usually just power down, and restart it. Not sure if it is
a software or hardware glitch.

The most interesting problem is my Magellen reboots itself from time
to time. Always (almost) the same location, southern CT, on trips from
Florida to NH. Get into CT, headed for Hartford, and at some point it
reboots--and has done it several times. There's somethign there,
interfering with it I'm sure.

ps56k wrote:
Just an incoming missile being jammed by ECM...
Or, some idiot following you with a GPS jammer as

It was an interesting moment thinking.....
- SA was turned back on.
- GPS System was hacked.
- Garmin receiver broke.
- Firmware update screwed device.
-

Last summer flying in northern California, the yoke-mounted Garmin in my
airplane couldn't find enough satellites for a fix, and wasn't able to
for the next hour or so before I landed. I was flying south at the time,
then east. It usually gets 10 or so satellites without a problem, and
that's the only time it's been unable to. An old Apollo GPS in the plane
was able to get a fix -- it has an external antenna mounted in the clear
on the top of the fuselage. Unfortunately I didn't take the time to see
where the current satellite positions were, but they must have been
bunched up pretty much overhead and/or high to the north and west.

It was another reminder that you should never depend on GPS as your only
available means of navigation.

Roy Lewallen