Posted: Mon Jul 20, 2009 12:22 pm
MoapaPk wrote:Man, I know what you mean. My GPS told me to invest all my money in Merrill-Lynch banking. Then it went and ate all my ice cream, then threw up on the rug. That rug held the room together.
My GPS (Garmin GPS-V, at the time) gave me a really weird false position one time. I was at Ribbon Falls (Grand Canyon) with a very poor view of the sky, and, in between not working at all, the GPS gave a position in the Pacific, about half-way between Baja California and Hawaii. Common sense told me I did not need to panic or tread water.
On a couple of other occasions, possibly with my (newer) Garmin 60CSx, it has shown false readings a big fraction of a mile from where I really was. (Of course these occurrences are always in places with poor or marginal satellite reception and possibly a reflected signal.) These readings seemed locked-in, meaning the position was not bouncing, the displayed position accuracy was a reasonably low value (~50 feet maybe), and the GPS did not fix its error for a substantial amount of time (several minutes).
But, on those occasions, I used that big fluffy thing between my ears to interpret the readings as b.s., and there was no harm done. The problems with GPS error arise when the user is enough unfamiliar with the GPS or enough unaware of his true location that the error isn't caught.