Why is my GPS reception poor?

Question

I get very poor GPS reception on my Droid X. When I turn GPS on, the little icon in the overhead bar has a flashing center, which means it hasn't found a satellite. It takes forever to lock on, if at all.

I've found it's better if I move around -- if I walk a 100 yards or so, it will often lock on, but not always.

This seems to have changes recently. It was great, then something changed. I just hard-reset the phone, so it has fresh settings (and I was having the problem previously, so it's nothing I did then reset).

Is something wrong with the phone?

Answer 1

There are a lot of potential variables here, but a hardware failure is certainly one possibility.

After over a year of use, my Nexus One's GPS became terribly slow to lock until I had moved a bit (like you said, maybe 100 yards) or was outside in a relatively clear area. I assumed this was because the GPS chip had, over time, started to develop problems and was likely throwing errors - oftentimes it would have my location totally wrong, and it wouldn't come on/off correctly.

Download a GPS test app, like GPS Status and Toolbox (link here), and see how long it takes to pick up satellites.

Also, are you using a custom ROM? I've found some ROMs "tweak" Android's default GPS settings, and this could potentially cause issues.

Really, there a ton of possibilities here, so it's hard to say. But aging hardware sounds the most likely to me, unless you've recently started using a different custom ROM or kernel, or recently received an update from Motorola.