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BoldFace
Feb 28, 2011

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

Why does it take older receivers a while to get a fix? I remember my old Garmin would sometimes take like a minute or more to show my location. Is it actually taking that long to solve some math or is there other stuff happening?

Because these satellites are transferring data to the receivers at the rate of 50 bits per second. You may have to wait more than 30 seconds to receive the parameters needed to calculate the satellite location and apply clock correction. If you have an internet connection, then the receiver can just download this information from online which is much faster. Even if there is no internet connection, modern receivers can still try to predict the satellite location from old data which they have received, which also speeds up the time to get a fix.

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