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vbman213

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 13, 2010
353
0
Driving home today, I decided to whip out my iPhone 4 to test out the GPS accuracy... It found me very quickly, but the blue dot was on the side of the road I was currently driving on... :/ The dot was not exactly on the road. Is there a problem with my GPS chip?
 
i am going to say its probably fine since we are talking about gps in a cellphone. how far of a distance would it have been off by (50 feet?) and for what amount of time was it doing this?
 
i am going to say its probably fine since we are talking about gps in a cellphone. how far of a distance would it have been off by (50 feet?) and for what amount of time was it doing this?

Probably. Not sure how long. Not too long. Also my compass was acting a little strange too while in the car. Apparently something was causing interference. I had to recalibrate it. The compass direction \ / was very very wide. Wider than I'd ever seen it before.


How can I test to make sure my GPS chip is not damaged. I did drop my iPhone onto soft carpet from about 2 feet. With a case btw. Just worried that I'm now finding issues that were caused by the fall. And fwiw, I have ZERO cosmetic damage from the drop. Externally, you would have no idea it feel. No cracks/scraps/dents/etc.
 
Probably. Not sure how long. Not too long. Also my compass was acting a little strange too while in the car. Apparently something was causing interference. I had to recalibrate it. The compass direction \ / was very very wide. Wider than I'd ever seen it before.


How can I test to make sure my GPS chip is not damaged. I did drop my iPhone onto soft carpet from about 2 feet. With a case btw. Just worried that I'm now finding issues that were caused by the fall. And fwiw, I have ZERO cosmetic damage from the drop. Externally, you would have no idea it feel. No cracks/scraps/dents/etc.

I think as a result of the drop you are more sensitive to finding flaws, its normal to do that. I wouldnt worry, the gps can sometimes be off like that, especialy in built up areas.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A306 Safari/6531.22.7)

Not uncommon for a GPS device to be off by a little bit sometimes. Also consider that mapping isn't perfect either. Plus your in a vehicle.

If you want to test it, walk outside into your yard (clear view if the sky) and sit tight for a few minutes. It may fluctuate a tiny bit. (one or two meters left... Back again. One or two meters up... then back again)

Almost forgot, there was one of those sunspot plasma thingies a few days ago. That can make radio and sat. stuff act a little weird.
 
I find gps is working quite accurately. Even navigating at 35mph, the location bubble refreshes every few seconds. I'm quite happy.
 
GPS is generally accurate to witin a few metres at best for commercial devices. If your position is within that after a while with a clear view of the sky, then there is nothing wrong. Your GPS is fine.

Your compass will not work well in most cars since there is a lot of magnetic interference from the dash and the engine.
 
Your compass will not work well in most cars since there is a lot of magnetic interference from the dash and the engine.

This. If you have a good old-fashioned analog compass, try it out in your car. I haven't had one work in a car for many years (luckily they tend to be installed in newer cars along with driver's consoles or nav systems).
 
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