Newbie comments and questions (a little long)

[thodge]

Hello to All!

Maria (my GF) gave me an iQue for Christmas to replace my aging Palm IIIxe and Garmin eMap. It's taken me a little time to change how I do things on this "all-in-one" device, but I'm getting there!

There are some features I love and some things I hate about the iQue.

Pro: The Voice direction system is absolutely excellent!
Con: The time to determine position ranges from fair to poor.

This example has happened several times: We shut the unit off to go inside a location. After walking back outside it would take several minutes to re-establish our location although we didn't move.
This has even happened when the GPSr indicates three or more satelite signals of good strength are available.

:confused: Any ideas here gang?? Is there a "procedure" to follow to shorten acquistion time?

Battery life:
Well, this topic has been beaten to death. But in 8 days of ownership, battery life is a big issue. We barely got three hours of intermittent use while walking around Philly before we recieived the dreaded "Low Battery" warning.

I downloaded and ran RUNDOWN lat night and here are the results:

Rundown 1/1/2005
Time, elapsed, pct, volts, cV/h
18:36, 0, 100, 420, 0.000
19:47, 70, 88, 414, 4.963
19:51, 74, 86, 413, 5.469
19:56, 79, 84, 412, 5.921
20:01, 84, 82, 411, 6.328
20:06, 89, 80, 410, 6.696
20:11, 94, 78, 409, 7.031
20:16, 99, 77, 408, 7.031
20:21, 104, 75, 407, 7.313
20:26, 109, 73, 406, 7.572
20:38, 121, 70, 405, 7.274
20:44, 127, 68, 404, 7.500
20:49, 132, 66, 403, 7.712
20:54, 137, 64, 402, 7.910
21:00, 143, 62, 401, 7.858
21:06, 149, 60, 400, 8.036
21:12, 155, 58, 399, 7.981
21:20, 163, 57, 398, 7.933
21:27, 170, 55, 397, 8.086
21:36, 179, 53, 396, 8.036
21:56, 199, 50, 395, 7.480
22:06, 209, 47, 393, 7.749
22:17, 220, 43, 391, 7.843
22:29, 232, 40, 390, 7.670
22:45, 248, 37, 388, 7.627
23:01, 264, 33, 386, 7.712
23:20, 283, 30, 385, 7.346
23:36, 299, 27, 383, 7.433
23:47, 310, 23, 381, 7.513
23:59, 322, 20, 380, 7.401

:mad:
Pretty poor from what's supposed to be a brand new unit from www.gpsnow.com. Pepole with units that are several months old have better performance than my "brand new" unit.

Well that's it for now. Any advice is most welcome!

Tim

[Q-Eye]

The time it takes to reacquire satellites can vary a great deal based on how clear a view of the sky you have. I have also seen the problem of actually having acquired sats and yet the 'Que doesn't switch in to 2D or 3D mode for awhile. This is MUCH less of a problem with an external antenna such as the much favored "Gilsson". I now have one of those and the reception and speed of acquisition have improved tremendously.

As for the battery, there is one thing you definitely need to do when navigating on internal battery power and that is to turn down the screen brightness to the lowest level you can and still be able to see what you need to see. Full brightness on that large screen will eat up your battery amazingly fast. You might check out the program "BrightIQ" which can automate setting different brightness levels based on current conditions (on cradle or off, daytime or night, etc.)

[JMckie]

At 320 minutes your battery life is actually above average. The mean has been about 300 minutes.

The reacquistion delay seems a little long. If you are standing next to a building, that blocks 50% of all visible satellites already. Even a view of three satellites is non-optimal if they are not sufficiently spread apart.

The external antenna will help, but I agree this is silly when walking around. Perhaps you could bring along your old GPS to compare performance. Then you will have a better idea if you have a problem unit or not.

[Ken in Regina]

As has been mentioned, the screen backlight is the biggest battery gobbler, and it's bad. Do turn the brightness to the lowest level you can work with any time you have the iQue turned on.

Turn the iQue off when you aren't using it. Don't wait for the timeout to do it. The GPS will keep working as long as the antenna is flipped up. If you don't need to look at the map for awhile, turn the iQue off. It will come right back to the map with your current position when you turn it back on.

Another tip on acquisition time and battery life is to disable WAAS and set the GPS into battery saver mode:

Que > Preferences > GPS

You can buy or build an external battery pack that holds four AA batteries (preferably rechargeables). You can use it to either do a quick top-up of the internal battery when you stop for coffee, or you can just plug it in and let the iQue run on it. These will typically give you four to five charges for the internal battery or an equivalent extension in time if you just leave it plugged in.

It also lets you grab a pack of AA batteries from any convenience store if you won't be able to conveniently get to your charging cradle any time soon. Drop the AA batteries into the battery pack and keep on truckin'. You can spend anywhere from US$10 to more than $100 on one.

If you would like to use regular alkaline AA batteries regularly you should make sure to get one that has a voltage regulator built in. Might cost a little more but worth it. The voltage delivered by regular alkalines is higher (total of about 6 volts) than delivered by equivalent rechargeables (total of about 5 volts, which is what the iQue prefers).

[apersson850]

If you turn your iQue off, manually, by pressing the power button, then it's off. Even if the antenna is unfolded. Only when it times out, does it go into "active sleep", with the GPS on and everything else off.

But you can set the time-out to a shorter setting, the GPS to battery save mode and the backlight as low as visibility permits.

[Ken in Regina]

Thanks for the correction, Anders. Of course you are right that if you turn it off manually, it's off. One of those times when the computer does what you tell it to do rather than what you want it to do. :)