etrex vista c - problem "acquiring satellites"

I have had a brand new etrex vista c for nine days. It has been operating
very well. Then the batteries wore down and I replaced them (twice,
alkaline). The unit starts up, but will not acquire satellites. I have gone
through all the options on the menu page associated with the "acquiring
satellites" page. I, also, re-downloaded the software from Garmin. It still
will not connect to satellites. Any ideas?

Thank you

Paul Youd wrote:

Try resetting the local time and approx. position before searching, but
leave the instrument on for at least an hour.

I had a Magellan GPS 315 that showed a similar behaviour, probably after a
static or some disturbing interference caused by my FM car radio (could
never be sure!).
From the user point of view, this made think about some "antenna broken"
problem, because all menus worked but not satellites acquiring !


Magellan service people were very kind, by e-mail, although this 315 was
second hand and not registered.
They answered in a couple of days, offering me to phone them while keeping
my 315 at hand. «We think we can do something with your GPS», they said.

By this time I had already solved the problem with 2 actions:

1) keeping the batteries OUT of the unit for one night (not a few minutes).
2) erasing all (user memory) and resetting the unit.

I am positive I did not modify or reload the firmware.

Hope this helps.
This cannot hurt your unit anyway.

Mike from Canada.


Y66dnRo6dtaq6DDenZ2dnUVZ_tqdnZ2d@usadatanet.net...

Are you outside?

dreamcachers wrote:

I had a similar problem with my Vista (B&W) when I put one of the
batteries in the wrong way round (i.e. the pair were delivering 0
volts). I left the machine like this for 7 days - and when I switched
the unit on the internal clock was about 6 hours out.

Given that the satellites take 12 hours to orbit - all the satellites it
was expecting to see were round the other side of the world - so it
couldn't see any!.

I set the system to re-acquire satellites - which it did within 4 minutes.

Cheers Kirby