Still having location problems - 2.1 ROMs - Hero CDMA General

With the number of different 2.1-based roms available now, do any of them address the issue of the device reporting its location incorrectly when GPS is turned off?
I'm running with the DC Rom v2.07.2 and am thinking about flashing the latest Fresh rom just to see if it makes any difference at all
Prior to installing any 2.1 based rom, with the GPS off, the tower derived location always worked perfectly and never had any problems pinpointing right where I was on the map. After moving to 2.1 though, my location is now always reported as at least 1 or 2 miles away, sometimes more. It seems to be reporting a tower location rather than triangulating between towers to determine my actual location.
I've seen messages by others experiencing similar issues, but there's never any follow up on them. So I'm just curious, how many people really notice that their non-gps location is wrong and is there any way to fix this, other than going back to 1.5?

mkhopper said:
With the number of different 2.1-based roms available now, do any of them address the issue of the device reporting its location incorrectly when GPS is turned off?
I'm running with the DC Rom v2.07.2 and am thinking about flashing the latest Fresh rom just to see if it makes any difference at all
Prior to installing any 2.1 based rom, with the GPS off, the tower derived location always worked perfectly and never had any problems pinpointing right where I was on the map. After moving to 2.1 though, my location is now always reported as at least 1 or 2 miles away, sometimes more. It seems to be reporting a tower location rather than triangulating between towers to determine my actual location.
I've seen messages by others experiencing similar issues, but there's never any follow up on them. So I'm just curious, how many people really notice that their non-gps location is wrong and is there any way to fix this, other than going back to 1.5?
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Most of those issues were caused by the Airave.

of course your location will be off when not using GPS, because you are using cell tower triangulation to give an approx area of your location the only way to give your true location is with GPS enabled

I understand that non-GPS location isn't perfect, but as I mentioned, when using OS v1.5, be it stock or a custom rom, with the GPS turned off, location based on tower triangulation was (almost) always dead on. It was actually quite surprising how accurate it was. And if it didn't pinpoint my exact location at times, it at least locked to the nearest tower.
After moving to v2.1 however, location data derived by tower triangulation is constantly wrong and is always off by a few miles or more no matter where I'm at. I don't use the Airave.
In my home, right now, all location values and maps show that I'm about 6 miles from where I'm actually sitting. I was in that area about 6 miles away about 5 hours ago. The phone however thinks it's still there. (Rebooting reset the location closer to my immediate area, but it's still wrong.)
When I'm at work, location is shown locked to a tower about 2 miles away, which I know is not the nearest, no matter where in the immediate area I go.
Maybe I'm making more of a deal of this than it needs to be, but it's something that worked in the older OS versions and now doesn't, at least correctly and it bugs me. And unfortunately, I don't know enough about the system programming internals to start pulling things apart looking for differences in location coding between OS versions 1.5 and 2.1.

Try updating and re-activating to sprint.
When mine was messed up it was due to my PRI being incorrect.
When I re-activated my phone everything seems to be working fine.
How fix PRI. READ IF YOU HAVE FLASHED ANY DEV ROM
[Resolved]Network Location problem / bug? (2.1)

did you update the radio? maybe your phone is seeing different towers.
I can say personally for me that my location jumps from being almost perfect to a mile away when I am at home. One day the middle dot is spot on and the next day it is a mile away(always in the same spot). When the phone is stationary in one spot the cell tower location can goofy.

dailypush said:
Try updating and re-activating to sprint.
When mine was messed up it was due to my PRI being incorrect.
When I re-activated my phone everything seems to be working fine.
How fix PRI. READ IF YOU HAVE FLASHED ANY DEV ROM
[Resolved]Network Location problem / bug? (2.1)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I never flashed any v2.1 ROM created from the Eris base, which as we've read, seems to what lead to the original issue with PRIs. I only moved to 2.1 with the newest DamageControl ROMs created from the leaked "official" 2.1 Hero base, and only after confirming that I didn't have the PRI issue.
Was running with Fresh 1.0 for the longest time.
Upgraded to OS v2.1 by wiping and flashing DC v2.0r3.
Wiped and flashed DC v2.05 and then flashed up to DC v2.07.2.
My PRI has always been 1.68_003 and has not changed during any of these updates.
The only thing I have not done is to flash the newest radio. Seems most people have done it with no issues, but I've always been a little on the fence with messing with that part of the device. I may have to do it though if for no other reason than to check it off the list of possible issues.

[Resolved (?)] Still having location problems - 2.1 ROMs
Flashed the updated radio and the location issue seems to be resolved, sort of.
Now the location bounces around from each of the three closest towers, sometimes settling on my exact location for a few moments before cycling around the towers again.
However, this is at least much better than it was before and is close enough for government work, as they say.

Related

Why is location services broken in ALL 2.1 roms?

Do we have any idea how to fix this? I've had problems on literally every 2.1 ROM tried so far. This includes DamageControl 9999 and v1, DarchStar, DarchLegend v2, Toast/Flipz 2.01
Basically (and Gbhil has verified this as well) the network location isn't functioning properly. For example, I am in a suburb of Kansas City, and my location shows on EVERY SINGLE 2.1 ROM as Overland Park, which is over 30 minutes away from me.
GPS will work properly, but this messes up literally every location based app, including my own I'm developing, which grabs your location and does some other stuff with it (which I can't divulge at the moment, ha)
I am literally floored that there aren't more people reporting this. It's not always messed up, I'd say 80-90% of the time it shows as off.
Any devs or others have any idea as to why this is?
Is this a "basically we have to wait for the Sprint 2.1 ROM to come out" issue? Thanks!
kmartburrito said:
Do we have any idea how to fix this? I've had problems on literally every 2.1 ROM tried so far. This includes DamageControl 9999 and v1, DarchStar, DarchLegend v2, Toast/Flipz 2.01
Basically (and Gbhil has verified this as well) the network location isn't functioning properly. For example, I am in a suburb of Kansas City, and my location shows on EVERY SINGLE 2.1 ROM as Overland Park, which is over 30 minutes away from me.
GPS will work properly, but this messes up literally every location based app, including my own I'm developing, which grabs your location and does some other stuff with it (which I can't divulge at the moment, ha)
I am literally floored that there aren't more people reporting this. It's not always messed up, I'd say 80-90% of the time it shows as off.
Any devs or others have any idea as to why this is?
Is this a "basically we have to wait for the Sprint 2.1 ROM to come out" issue? Thanks!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine's better than it was in 1.5!
It shows that I'm in Sugar land, but in 1.5 when I went to school it showed I was in Richmond.
I went out of town recently and I had to refresh it like 5 times to get it to show up. I think it was changed to help battery life. Not really a big thing to me. I just have the location saved as the second spot so I can check if it doesn't want to refresh.
I can't explain your issue, but location services with GPS off on DC1.0 with my phone is dead nuts accurate. Puts the blue dot directly over my house. I haven't tried it outside the house yet. I'll report back when I do.
J
Edit: I tried network based location at three different locations around town today and it worked flawlessly every time. I'm hoping Sprint never decides to target me with a smart bomb using GPS--if they do, I'm a gonner.
There is actually quite a bit written about this but no sure fix that I have found. Location works fine for me in Maps but in everything else it is way off in a weird way. At home it shows my location as 200+ miles away. At work, which is only 8 miles from my house, by location is shown some 30 miles away. You are right. It is only on the 2.1 Roms so I use Beautiful Home or Weather Widget both of which allow me to at least specify my weather address.
I am having the same issue. Its about 20 miles off. I do have a Airwave at home, but I unplugged it and still same thing after doing a refresh. When I go city to city it changes but for some reason I think it is 20 south of my location so when I do switch cities, it would be correct 20 miles south. With that said, my actually GPS for gmaps is dead on target.
it seems to me that its mainly the application being used that makes the location inaccurate..or is that just me?
Mine has not had any issues so far. Better than ever. I'm using DamageControl v1 with the new radio.
superlinkx said:
Mine has not had any issues so far. Better than ever. I'm using DamageControl v1 with the new radio.
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i'm using the exact same thing.. works well for me.
superlinkx said:
Mine has not had any issues so far. Better than ever. I'm using DamageControl v1 with the new radio.
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Click to collapse
ditto. Same thing here and no issues with network location.
See, and the inconsistency bothers me too. It should really be broken for everyone, not just a few of us.
GPS is fine, but with network, it's definitely broken. Weird, I guess I'll wait for the Sprint ROM versions.
I bet you it has something to do with us not having something from Sprint in these releases.
no issues here with darchdroid
kmartburrito said:
See, and the inconsistency bothers me too. It should really be broken for everyone, not just a few of us.
GPS is fine, but with network, it's definitely broken. Weird, I guess I'll wait for the Sprint ROM versions.
I bet you it has something to do with us not having something from Sprint in these releases.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Download a rom like DarchDroid(people don't seem to get errors with it), extract the .zip and browse through the apps on the rom, find LocationPicker.apk and LocationService.apk(With their odex files) and push them to your phone from recovery, delete dalvik cache and boot cache and reboot your phone.
kmartburrito said:
See, and the inconsistency bothers me too. It should really be broken for everyone, not just a few of us.
GPS is fine, but with network, it's definitely broken. Weird, I guess I'll wait for the Sprint ROM versions.
I bet you it has something to do with us not having something from Sprint in these releases.
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Click to collapse
mines usually, but not always, accurate. hows that for inconsistancy?
in 1.5 i shut location off unless i have to use my gps I-GO app. location seems to drain the battery.
Coarse (network-based) location seems to usually work fine for me (running DC1.0). I say 'usually', because once in a while it will decide I'm in the Atlantic Ocean ~20 miles east of Miami instead of western Broward County (~10 miles west of the beach)... but I've ALWAYS had that problem, even with stock 1.5.
Has anyone noticed a correlation between tower density, signal strength, and accuracy? If the worst inaccuracies are noticed in fringe suburban areas (where you might be lucky to have a single good tower signal, let alone 3+), that might explain it. The 2.1 algorithm might work better (or at least use less power) in urban areas, but fail more often in fringe areas. This might also be more of an issue with Sprint, because Sprint's network tends to be slightly less robust in fringe areas than Verizon's.
Out of curiosity, is the algorithm known to "cheat" if you're in a fringe rural area where the service is primarily along a single major corridor (like I-75 through the Everglades, or the Turnpike halfway between Orlando and Fort Pierce), and automatically limit its estimates to locations physically along that road?
Mine seems to work fine, at least with the weather widget. I'll double check tomorrow when I drive 150 miles west, and see if it still updates. Even 1.5 wasn't all that good at updating my location without me refreshing.
I do know that my weather is wrong though. Still says it's cloudy here, and the only clouds are a good 50 miles north lol
Hmmm. flashed fresh-2.0b and also installed the new radio. With location setting and GPS on, I get the same location errors I mentioned earlier. With location setting set to '911 only' and GPS off, weather and browser location is accurate. I use GPS for Nav, but if I am not using it, this will work for me. Can anyone try with another 2.1 Rom and confirm if that works for them?
When I first installed 2.1 it was showing me in a different state. But when I flashed the new radio that fixed everything. Now it's only wrong if I'm home and connected to my Airave.
wcgbmd said:
Download a rom like DarchDroid(people don't seem to get errors with it), extract the .zip and browse through the apps on the rom, find LocationPicker.apk and LocationService.apk(With their odex files) and push them to your phone from recovery, delete dalvik cache and boot cache and reboot your phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Think you could do the same with the picker and service from the 1.5 roms? I always had perfect performance before moving to any of the 2.x roms. That's the exact moment when it started happening. I can switch back to a nandroid backup of 1.5 and it runs just fine too. Still kinda baffled at all of this.

GPS Inaccuracy while in car?

Strange error I haven't noticed until a few weeks ago.
I've tested in both Damage Control v1, v2.05, and Fresh 2.0d (current ROM i'm running)
With google maps/nav it always places me about 50 feet+ to one side of the street. It moves with the vehicle just fine, but always puts me on a side street, so if I'm traveling down a 2 lane highway it's constantly saying "turn right onto hwy xxx"
My GPS is always DEAD ON accurate though. I mean even inside my house if I'm at the front of the house it puts that dot within 5 feet, if I goto the back of the house (bedroom) it puts me RIGHT OVER that spot. The movement however is not so great. My phone while in the GPS mount has a clear view of the sky through the windshield.
Am I the only one experiencing this?
Google NAV is basically useless, because of the annoying constant re-routing.
I had this on Thursday when I was traveling for the holiday. I was using DC2.0r2 at the time however. I didn't have the same experience with my last install of DC2.05. I will repost after my trip today. Might be some time.
Bump...
10char
Same here.gps problem with 2.1?
Yes I have this problem. It's been mentioned in the main damageless thread and the bug thread so I think people are aware of it.
I was having the same issue with the dcr2 but it went away when I wiped and went over to freshes. Might be cuz It's based off the latest Sprint leak?
Works very well for me on dcv2. I think it's almost as good as co-pilot with the directions. It's so easy to start by going "navigate to 123 fake st". I usually had to restart my phone every time I wanted to use co-pilot otherwise it couldn't find a gps signal.
Also seeing this issue.
When I fired up navigator it started telling me to make the first turn (down the street) before I even got in my car -- so I had to use maps instead. Using maps, my marker was always a bit off. For example, it was showing me consistently North of the road (not on any road) when I was traveling West. Not sure exactly when this started, but I am currently running Fresh 2.0d, just for the record.
EDIT: Also, just FYI, this is with a good and proper GPS lock. It does follow my every move and turn, and is entirely responsive, but it seems as though my location is consistently mis-calibrated somehow, and always by the same amount/direction.
Anyone tried pushing one of the 1.5 gps.conf files to a 2.1 rom and seeing if it makes a difference?? I remember that was a fix in the early 2.1 roms from flipz that came out. Try it and see.
All seemed to be working OK today for me. This is like my third/fourth flash of a 2.1 ROM that seemed to have done it for me. No more flashing for a little while. Not that it is a fix at all, but I've had it both not work and work after switching out a few different ROMs.
I was going to make a thread on this. It was off for most of my trip. I muted the audio and just watched for my exit. After awhile it moved me on top of the road and it was ok, but it did it again a few other places.
It was a really odd bug. DC2.05
It worked for me in D1. But it's off in D2. GPS seems to be fairly accurate when just finding my location in maps. It's when I start to nav that it goes off.
It actually started doing that thing today where it can't find a GPS signal until it's restarted again, so I guess it's not unique to the ROM or nav software. My phone just seems to be bad with GPS if it's been a while without a fresh restart.
Has anyone tried using the Sprint Navigation on this or is it just Google's beta Navigation application? For me I never did actually try the Sprint nav, just stuck in the Google one. I knew where I was going the whole time, so instead of trying things I just shut it off.

GPS woes

I'm beginning to wonder whether my GPS is busted, could it be that the receiver is so weak it fails to see even 1 satellite (according to GPS Status) when the sky is overcast? In fair weather it reports seeing 2 or 3 after a couple minutes but doesn't fix.
In fact I don't really remember when was the last time I saw it fix my location, maps report my location with an uncertainty of several hundred meters (and sometimes plain wrong), so it must be the cell network location and not the gps location.
I'm not really eager to claim warranty cause I'm sure I'd get the phone back from the repair shop RUU'd to an unrootable state. Running recent SuperD but problems already appeared when I was on another ROM (always old radio though).
Well I tried restoring the factory ROM (cupkake, no SenseUI) but keeping the custom recovery and Eng. SPL -- all worked fine, and now the GPS does seem to fix location. It does take several minutes and precision is reported as around 50 m, but at least it appears to work. I don't really intend to stay on that ROM though, so still looking for a solution.
OK, so now for a change I tried flashing new radio and installing the official cupcake/senseUI update from HTC (but without the perfect SPL). Not much of a change with the GPS, it seems to fix faster (less than a minute outdoors) but the precision reported by GPS Status is still pretty bad (60 meters and more).

[BUG] Refurb Phones, GPS, and AOSP ROMs

I love AOSP ROMs. They are the bomb-diggity. I only have one problem with them:
GPS does not work for everybody.
Let me explain the problem. When doing a long navigation, after about 20 - 30 minutes, Maps will lose the GPS signal and stay at "Searching for GPS..." until toggling GPS OFF and then ON. After it loses the signal the first time, it loses it again and again in the same fashion in about 5 minutes intervals.
Now, this is not a problem for everybody. For some people it works fine, and for the rest, we seem to be stuck with this rather irritating bug.
I do have a theory, though - I believe that there are two (or more) hardware revisions for our phones. I believe that a lot of refurbs have an older hardware revision, that run into these problems, and the newer phones have a newer hardware revision that do NOT have these issues.
What I need is someone that has reported this issue to take a logcat during a navigation and to get the results onto this thread so we can get them to a dev that may be able to fix this issue. I would do this myself, but I am out of money and only have enough gas in my car to make it back home tonight after work.
So, please, if there is anyone running an AOSP ROM (CELB and WW both have the issue) on a refurb or near launch phone, if you have the time and the resources, take a logcat of a failed navigation. It may get us closer to a cure for this bug.
DEVS: If any of you read this thread, I have an idea - if it is possible, you may want to pull apart your kernels and take a look at the part that interacts with the GPS and compare that to another kernel like zanfur's or the HTC kernel, which both have nary a problem with the GPS.
I have already tried fussing with the *.so files that are for the GPS, and they either made the problem worse or completely broke GPS.
Let's see if we can find a cure.
-SSJ
I dont think its the hardware at all. I have run into this problems are certain versions of roms but once I flash another its fine. CLB2.7 gps worked great used it from Arkansas to Florida but the gps from the Cyanogen 1.1 the gps constantly lost signal.
edgeupgx said:
I dont think its the hardware at all. I have run into this problems are certain versions of roms but once I flash another its fine. CLB2.7 gps worked great used it from Arkansas to Florida but the gps from the Cyanogen 1.1 the gps constantly lost signal.
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I don't think it's a hardware problem, I think it's a problem with the way that some kernels interact with different (read: older) hardware revisions.
I'm Hardware Revision 0002 according to Home > Menu > Settings > About Phone > Hardware Information.
I usually just use Google Maps to get the directions, then peek at them every once in a while to save battery.
Once I get a car mount for my phone (soon), I'm sure I'll use GPS more often though.
No troubles with any GPS I've ever done. It may be all Eris's, at random. Like when the 3g disappears and reappears and starts cycling (until you reboot the phone).
Same idea.
I have a refurb phone and while using CELB 2.7 I drop GPS signal every 20 minutes or so. When using Ivan's rom, I never drop signal.

GPS testing paradigm

Each time I flash new ROM, I go test GPS performance with GPS Test to see whether something changed.
What I'm interested in is primarily lock on speed, and also how solid the lock to satellites is, but that's secondary. (since froyo, the locks seem pretty solid, no more sudden drops like in eclair)
What I noticed is that even with same firmware this varies quite a lot, even when I try to make the test conditions vary as little as possible (I always test it from the same spot and hold it the same way to ensure similar signal propagation. I can't control the weather, but as it's winter, it usually overcast).
So my question is, do you find you lock on speed varies a lot with same firmware and in same conditions?
Mine can vary from a few seconds (rarely) to losing the patience after few minutes of waiting for the lock! (more often)
Is this normal or am I having some weird issues?
Because if this kind of huge variation is normal, then all my testing is pointless!
Same thing here, but used to me more "consistent" with original rom (2.1 from Bell canada, can't remember wich one). Now on jl2 it takes longer to get a fix and weather seems to impact more.
same problem...
gps works extremely unconsistant.
me and my girlfriend have same phone with same firmware and 99% same apps installed. if we put the phones next to each other the gps signal is sometimes the same somethimes really different. we tried to find out how this could be but didnt find any difference. some days ago i turned my gps on as we were at the city together and it took really long to get the location. and then looke dat google latitude and holy **** my girlfriend got the cirrect position there even without taking it out the pocket and her gps was turned off lol. thats a bit scary sometimes.
now i installed gps tracker booster to stay at the same location if im indoor. otherwise it jumps from one location to another all the times and latitude says ive driven 4000km in a day just because i was at home and walked from fridge to the toilet...
I wonder if it has anything to do with hardware antenna issues. There was a thread here somewhere. It might be, and yet it might not be. I'd like to be able to check if I have this hardware issue before risking my phone and surely voding the warranty.
It does seem to be somewhat software dependent, but that isn't enough. Inconsistency proves nothing
I could also swear it's getting worse with the time. In 2.1 I used to be able to get a lock in half a minute or so in the worst case (even if it wasn't solid). In 2.2 it was better but in 2.2.1 versions it was all over the place. Usually amazing just after installing the ROM, but then going downhill. So maybe it's just worsening with time or oscillating with ROMs. I'd need days of flashing and testing to get it sorted out - possibly.
Total confusion... In the end I'll just buy a dedicated GPS with a big antenna. Exactly what I wanted to avoid by getting the Galaxy.
Well, i did a lot of testing with my Galaxy S.
The only conclusion i got is that different roms impact the time the Gps takes to aquire lock.
I also concluded that is due to GPS hardware keeps losing the sinal makes you apear in places which in reality you're not or showing that you are going across a road when you are stopped.
In this case A-GPS diminuishes your acurracy.
t1mman said:
Same thing here, but used to me more "consistent" with original rom (2.1 from Bell canada, can't remember wich one). Now on jl2 it takes longer to get a fix and weather seems to impact more.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I got slow fixes with JL2 too. But I am now testing "MS based" which improves lock time a lot (less than 20 seconds). I need more testing to make sure that my device is still accurate however.
bluecluster said:
Usually amazing just after installing the ROM, but then going downhill. So maybe it's just worsening with time or oscillating with ROMs.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Exact issue here... Lately I thought that I have some kind of bad habits due to installing new roms. But now i see, that I'm not the only one with this.
nalu_pl said:
Exact issue here... Lately I thought that I have some kind of bad habits due to installing new roms. But now i see, that I'm not the only one with this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had a "new" issue one time where it got all over the place so I deleted the data and redownloaded it (with GPS Status) and it fixed it. Might be that it keeps old data instead of refreshing it.
But it's not related to the time to fix

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