Sat Nav acting crazy

[praveenshere]

Hi,
Recently my Satnav in my Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV Gx4hs is acting strange. It is normally very reliable, but of late (at least on 2 separate instances) where the satnav did not recognize my home and showed as if I'm driving off-road and the entire locality does not exist. Another time, I did not put the route, but the map showed as if I am 10 - 15 miles off where I currently was, though after driving for 30 minutes or so, it suddenly pointed to the right location. Has anyone else faced similar issues? If so, any idea how to resolve this?

- Praveen

 

[maby]

Where are you located? Could GPS jamming be going on in your area?

Some years ago, I was working with a military research team and visited their HQ quite often - they did a lot of GPS jamming and it amused them to put me in the middle of Paris or Madrid as I left the site! I gather that some lorry drivers now carry jammers in the cab to block the tachograph and dodge the rules on length of time behind the wheel.

 

[praveenshere]

I'm located in Harold Wood (near Romford). It was working fine since September last year. The first time I faced this issue was when returning from Gatwick where I used the Meet & Greet service. I thought the driver had changed some map settings or something, but this happened again yesterday where the map location was off by 10 - 15 miles and it continued to report wrong location for about 30 or so minutes till I cam closer to East Ham when the map again started pointing to the right location. Very strange. May be caused by GPS jamming, but not too sure as it has never happened before.

 

[maby]

I don't think there would be any official GPS jamming testing going on in that area - the military only do that in remote areas. I guess it might just have been a case of a poor GPS constellation - sometimes the satellites get into a configuration that does not support a good fix. Also tends to be worse when you are driving north - at least in the northern hemisphere.

It seems unlikely to be down to unofficial jamming - the cheap devices that are imported only have a range of a few tens of yards - you could temporarily lose positioning as you drive past a lorry carrying one, but not for 10 or 15 minutes unless you were following the same lorry all the way.