Apologies for not posting anything new in ages, but thought I’d share this little gem. Last year, I bought myself a Navman 300 Pocketpc GPS unit. As I used it more and more, I found it extemely difficult to establish a satellite lock, which meant I couldn’t use the stupid thing. When it worked, it worked okay, but it was hard getting it to work to begin with.

Now there are several general tips I tried using to establish a lock and improve my reception. I made sure the car wasn’t moving when I switched the Navman on, stayed away from high buildings, made sure my car windscreen wasn’t electronically heated etc… but nothing worked.

Earlier on in the year, I attempted to load TomTom 5 onto the Navman (which worked!), but I’ll blog about that some other day. Anyway, it was almost impossible trying to test the unit since it was increasingly difficult to establish a satellite lock. In frustration, I decided to buy an external antenna to improve the reception. I blamed the hardware, thinking the little foldout antenna on the Navman 300 was the cause. There are lots of cheaper external antennas available on eBay for much less than Navman charges.

Anyway, just when I was about to throw in the towel, I stumbled onto this web page, that had a firmware that claimed to dramatically improve the reception. By this stage, I was ready to try anything, so I downloaded the firmware, followed the instructions and experienced no problems.

And I’m happy to say, my satellite reception takes less than 30 seconds on average to establish a lock. And when it’s locked on, it stays locked on, unless I’m inside the Sydney Harbor Tunnel of course.

I have heard cases of people stuffing up their Navman as a result of loading this firmware, so while it did work for me, exercise caution. No one’s going to be held responsible if your Navman becomes an ugly PocketPC only pda.

http://www.fiddaman.info/navmanpin/download.htm