Sam Washington wrote:I just flew on this past Friday from Cleveland, MS (KRNV) to Pine Bluff, AR (KPBF) for a weekend fly-in of the Black Pilots of America. During the flight to KPBF, the I-Fly performed flawlessly. However, when I returned home on Saturday afternoon, the I-Fly never obtained a GPS lock throughout the entire 45-minute flight. I also have a Lowrance 500 that locked in and stayed true the entire flight. The I-Fly has done this on several occasions and I wonder if there is a reset time that is needed when the unit is flown to a different location and does not return to its home base on the same day. Should the unit be powered up for several minutes prior to flying to allow the satelites to hone in on the unit and update it or should it have automatically remembered the previous location that it was flown too and set itself up for that location from memory? It's not a huge issue, but it has happened enough to begin to be annoying. I want to ensure that I'm not missing a step before I order an external antenna for the unit.
Sam Washington
Sam: I have encountered GPS lock issues because of an old #2 Nav/Comm that is poorly shielded. When that comm is tuned to certain frequencies it actually blocks GPS signals. If I change the freq on that old comm or shut it off, the GPS locks very quickly. It took me a while to figure out that correlation, but I was happy to discover it was/is not the GPS, but rather electromagnetic emissions from the comm. ===Ralph