OUT OF THE BLUE

OK- since I’ve been doing more outdoors-type stuff, some of which involves being out in the boondocks (to clarify– of Wisconsin), I’ve been wanting a GPS unit more and more. Now, I have a Blackberry Pearl 8130 (US Cellular) that actually has GPS functionality built in– but it only kinda works, and then only sometimes.

For the first few months I had the 8130, GPS and BBMaps worked fine. It was able to find satellites most of the time within a minute and stay locked on, even in the car. Then, it worked less and less often– I was able to get a lock for most of the way from Madison to Chicago on the bus in June, but couldn’t get a lock standing outside my apartment. The rest of July and August, it never got a lock. Ever. I switched to Google Maps for Mobile, which worked better; that at least gets me a fix within 1800 or so meters, which is close enough to identify a freeway interchange.

Last weekend I was out hiking in Token Creek County Park, where it would have been really nice to have a GPS powered map on my phone (since I, um, didn’t bring a compass or paper map– oops). Again, couldn’t get a lock. So I gave up and did some googling, and found some answers here and here– seems I’m not the only one dealing with the Pearl’s GPS not working.

Long story short– as indicated in the forum threads linked above, you really want to download GPSed.

It doesn’t fix the connectivity problem completely. There are still some times where I can’t get a fix in the same spot I got 10 satellites less than two hours ago. I have to use GPSed’s “Reset GPS” function fairly often to get a lock (which does work, again, fairly often). Once GPSed has locked on, though, BBMaps and Google Maps also lock on, which makes the whole package a lot more useful. I was able to use Google Maps satellite view to verify where I was vs. where the Blackberry thought I was– standing in a parking space at work, Google Maps had my position dot right in the middle of that parking space.

So, okay, the Blackberry’s probably not as reliable as a standalone GPS unit. But GPS units don’t do email. (Although I haven’t tried it, the 8130 does have Bluetooth, so one could feasibly use an external GPS unit. I need more pockets.)

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