My Sensation thinks I am in Japan

Man of Honour
Joined
17 Oct 2002
Posts
160,218
I have never had an issue with google maps before. It normally gets my location spot on no matter where I am in the world.

Today though it is convinced I am stood beside an expressway near Tokyo.

It happily zooms there each time I click show my location.

Any ideas?
 
It's to do with Google's location software (a persistent service run in Android OS). The usual cause is that a nearby switch is broadcasting the same identifier as one in a different location I believe. There's some order it uses which in theory is GPS > CID (Cell tower unique ID by a mobile network) > Wifi SSID+MAC > GeoIP but I think the wifi details trump CID or something odd.
 
If your phone is rooted you should download FasterFix from the market. It sets your location to uk.pool.ntp.org. Mine was set to north america by default :/

GPS fixes instantly now.
 
If your phone is rooted you should download FasterFix from the market. It sets your location to uk.pool.ntp.org. Mine was set to north america by default :/

GPS fixes instantly now.

Nice one - mine was set to Asia.

I've had a few issues with google maps positioning recently. Nothing major like Fox, but just stuff like it showing me driving up a nearby river, instead of on the motorway. Or refusing to update my position for a long time, despite me being in a moving car at the time.

Hope this fixes it, certainly seems to get a much quicker fix on the location.
 
It won't improve accuracy, faster fix is a fix for poorly implemented Assisted GPS.

A-GPS works by sending the current rough location (eg cell tower) to a central server (this is what faster fix, fixes - it sends it to a closer one) which will then send back a special set of data known as the GPS almanac which contains things like which satellites should be overhead, timing, stuff that it needs in order to calculate triangulation quicker. If it didn't send this data it could calculate it's position without it, but it takes around 10 minutes this way.

When you see issues like you're on a nearby motorway rather than the road near it, it's because the GPS receiver can only be accurate to X metres due to the quality of signal it's receiving. The quality depends on the phones antenna position, if it can see the sky directly etc...If you have an SGS1 for example you're lucky to get anything accurate over nearest 100M but other phones can be down to 10M or so.
 
When I moved flat and took my router with me, it thought I was still in my old flat... then it thought I was in Scotland, and now I'm where I belong ;)
 
This is getting very annoying.

I am sat in the same place I was when I first posted this thread.

Google maps now has my location as China.
 
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