yashsingh1/xdaforums huggingface dataset:
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
Ephemeric and almanac data

There is an api to query if a particular satellite has ephemeric or almanac data: link to api doc. I checked these data for all satellites that were spotted and which were contained in a fix. The boolean test on the functions hasAlmanac() and hasEphemeris() always failed, whether I turned on the aGPS or not.

link to Wiki documentation about ephemeris and almanac data.

Now, I really don't know what this means, but I'm very curious if other android devices, like for example the HTC Desire or Nexus will pass the hasAlmanac and hasEphemeris test.

I posted a app that will track these booleans here, but unfortunately nobody responded yet. Because I don't have the time to visit all kind of forums, maybe someone on this forum with another android device can run this app? It's a harmless app that will only track some GPS data.

If you run the app and the sats on your device contains almanac and ephemeric data you should see a output that is somewhat like this:

12: 30 snr Alm Eph
23: 22 snr (*) Alm Eph

(where for example 12 indicates a sat-id, 30 the signal noice ratio, (*) whether it is contained in a fix, and Alm and Eph if it containes the aforementioned data.

I attached the app also to this post. (btw it's a simple modification of the app I posted earlier on this forum). Unzip the attached file and copy the .apk file to your device. Click on it to install.

Thanks in advance
[Galaxy S I9000 General] NetCopAD:
Samsung Bulgaria

Just got a reply from Samsung Bulgaria.

It's in Bulgarian, but here is the translation:

Yep, sure, thanks. Great answer! But it does not change the fact that my 5 years old HTC Artemis beats the Galaxy S's GPS hands down when it comes to accuracy and reliability. Yeah, the SGS can get a fix inside my house, but who cares! I don't drive in my house and I don't hike in my house either.

I'm officially pissed now.

Thanks!

P.S: I tried to reply, but the support page is as buggy as a SGS GPS. Hope they received my reply.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] andrewluecke:
yes, but new drivers/settings might still fix this..
[Galaxy S I9000 General] nicoloco:
LOL !!

I sent a mail to samsung and they answered me the same kind of crap

When I wanted to reply with the reply button it asked for my phone number but the field was greyed so I couldn't input my number ..

If the same guy did the implementation of the GPS I understand why it's so poor !!
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Billus:
I use CoPilot Live Professional. Get an instant lock within 10 seconds. GPS seems to be highly acurate in most cases. This phone has replaced my TomTom as my dedicated GPS. I only wished there was a map for Australia on Android that contained speed camera information.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
can't you convert/use the poi's from tomtom with copilot? I'm almost sure that must be possible.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] aurelm:
I too confirm that jm5 fixed 80% of gps problems, at leas at first experiments. Very fast lock and good accuracy. Still has issues when in a bus or between tall buildings, the accuracy goes from 5/10 meters to 30meters and the position gets again all crazy, but all in one much much better. You can see it in the test application even, as it gets 8/9 sats in 3 seconds and locks on them much more secure, without jumping from 1 lock to 5, to 3, to none etc.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Hvdm57:
Hi

Using GPS TEST I typically gets 11 satellites in sight and a fix in 8 to 9.

All with a SNR between 20 and 40

with a 5-10 meter accuracy.

This must surely be said to be quite reasonable result.

When I use Google Map pops my marker round like a hunted rabbit.

This is inconsistent with the result that I get from GPS TEST.

Additional I experience that my GPS does not start when I open an App, for example. Google maps or Navigation or even GPS TEST.

I have to go into settings and and turn GPS off and then turn it on again to

get it activated in the program.

One problem I have not had before !

I'm using the default firmware.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] padlad:
Maybe, but it will taste better! ;)
[Galaxy S I9000 General] NetCopAD:
I'll be going on a 20km hike tomorrow and I'll try to record the track and compare it to my Artemis which has always performed well in such activities. It's a 10-12 hour journey so it's going to be a pretty good test. Lets hope the battery survives long enough.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] alkasteve:
Annoyingly even my old (well slightly older) T-Mobile Pulse can do the difficult task of holding onto a gps position - it's like night and day really. And doesn't require any kind of "fix" to get it working. Of which none of them have actually made any difference so far alas, in fact just popped My Tracks on and my location is flying all over the shop like i'm Mary Poppins or something!
[Galaxy S I9000 General] ghosty_uk:
for those of you not following the other thread (new) gps poll i posted this a few days ago on the samsung facebook page.

Ghosty like all the others here im happy with most of the phone but i had to take the first one back as it would never get a lock on any gps satalite, the second one however is a little better as a least this one can be used to navigate, but in my tracks it is all over the show, please can you at least issuse a statment about... what the fault actually is weather it be hardware or software/firmware, as the most annoying part of it all is not knowing what is wrong, as if its software/fimeware related im sure people will hangonto the phone waiting for the fix, if however it turns out to be hardware related then there is gonna be alot of upset customers, wanting exchanges. i think you just need to clarify exactly what the issue is, saying we are working on a fix just anit good enough, especially when you are locked into a 2yr contract with a phone that only half works.

come on samsung sort it out, and give the general public some idea of what is actually gonna be done about this.

and this is there response :

Samsung UK Mobile Hi, thanks for getting in touch. Head Office is currently working on a solution to the GPS problem and we hope to have a solution very soon. Rest assured, this is a high priority task for us.

so i guess they are trying to sort it out, ? ? ?
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beards:
Yes, they are..... BUT it would not hurt if they at the very least were a little more forthright in providing details.

All this 'cloak & dagger' quietness is not doing them any favours.

I sent Clove a message earlier and they are stuck..... Samsung are quiet, full stop!

Annoying isn't it. :(
[Galaxy S I9000 General] ghosty_uk:
my response to there response:

Ghosty thank you for the response, i am an active member of a forum where there is currently a 56 page thread about the gps issues, it seems i am one of the fortunate ones that after i got my first phone replaced, this second one does navigate, but most of the users of the forum arnt so lucky, i believe this problem is also on the captivate and vibrent. there is another thread on there which is currently at 5 pages, thought i expect this to get longer. the issue is no one knows weater it is hardware or software related, those that have managed to update to 2.2 froyo are still having the gps issue.

it seems not locking to satalites <20 SNR also plays a big part in it, as does only locking onto 8 satalites max, i did however manage 9 but that was only for a second then it dropped to 5 when it actually fixed my position. also not being able to set agps on or off without going to a hidden menu is abit disconcerting. i upgraded ??? from a touch hd, and so far besides the fact that that is windows and the galaxy S is android and the better screen, the touch has much better gps performance, coupled with the ability to turn agps off from the settings menu, it is much nicer to use for doing everything.

as i said in my OP half the battle is us not being kept informed about what it actually is that is wrong, i and several other members have found that doing somthing as simple as removing the backplate increases signal strenght by approx 5-10 SNR, which would suggest is more then just a software issue, i hope this is not the case as im just starting to get used to my galaxy and starting to enjoy it (all bar the GPS).

if you would like further info of tests carried out or any other data that has been collected by myself or others, let me know, as after all we want the same thing, fully functional GPS (without the tracking errors).
[Galaxy S I9000 General] dakine:
IMO Samsung's silence can only mean two things, they either don't know how to fix it yet or they do but it's hardware related and they will just quietly come out with a revision.

It could be that the bug is in broadcom's software.

But I get the feeling that Samsung doesn't have the brightest bunch of software engineers. If people here can figure out exactly why our phones are lagging then why can't Samsung fix it in a matter of days. We've had so many beta firmwares now and we still have to run our own lag fix.

Ridiculous :(
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
Well they are living up to their slogan (saw this yesterday in a commercial here in the Netherlands): Expect more.. :D
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Case_:
Samsung's silence can mean absolutely anything. It's the corporate world - it's better to not say anything at all than to say something and later live to regret it. They can't afford to comment all that much, even if they wanted to.

BTW, after hearing much praise at the JPJG8 firmware (Arabic), I've flashed it in the morning and been testing it all day and I must say, apart from being blazingly fast (lag is 100% gone and the phone reacts pretty much instantly), it also produced probably my best tracklog in MyTracks yet on my "test track" ;) It's not perfect, it still doesn't like me doing sudden sharp turns, the location marker still keeps moving even when I stop walking, but the track is close to acceptable and for car navigation, it would probably work fine. Not as accurate as on the Magic or VF845, but in the 10m accuracy zone most of the time. So I'm somehow optimistic again that the fix WILL come.

Well, unless the GPS just had one of its better days...
[Galaxy S I9000 General] chatin_62:
What program did you use?
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Kilack:
I wonder why head office is working on it, shouldn't the engineering department be working on it? :)

Nice to know they have at least said there is an issue but no useful information really, very soon could be anything.

Gives some hope at least.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] thunderstruck!:
They certainly avoided answering the question with that response. If the head office is working on it that would mean they are going to issue a statement saying you're holding it wrong.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Kilack:
I did a track yesterday was quite a nasty one.

I then was playing with google maps while in my drive standing still, bounced all over the place like it always does..

I assume the reason maps bounces so much is that it just uses exactly what is given by the gps chipset?

and navigation apps and certain others probably do more error checking? so if they get 5 values in the same spot then one 50 metres away they ignore it etc which is why so many people think that there is no problem with the gps usually...

Does that sound about right?
[Galaxy S I9000 General] foxbat121:
Head office probably means Samsung HQ in Korea where the engineering dept. also located.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] foxbat121:
Most navigation apps simply snap you to the nearest road. So even if you're half block away, your position is always on the road.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] boomerbubba:
Even the raw coordinates seem to be affected by some post-processing -- apparently some kind of buffering/smoothing/interpolating. Thus, apps such as My Tracks tend to show sort of decent performance much of the time when in a rapidly moving vehicle. The algorithmic weight given to earlier or later samplings under motion tends to follow the road -- especially when the road is straight. The track tends to go awry more often on curves and corners. And when the vehicle is stopped, things can really get lost and the cursor wanders. Meanwhile, tracks generated by walking or running, or just being stationary, tend to be pretty awful.

Then, if you use an app dedicated to vehicular navigation, the results can get post-processed even further. Unlilke My Tracks, which has no knowledge of where the roads are, dedicated navigation apps often include vector data for streets in addition to the raster map tiles that are displayed. Then they snap the cursor to the nearest road. This behavior seems benign and fools many naive end-users who think that the navigation app is "the GPS" -- until a tipping point where the cursor suddenly snaps to the wrong road entirely. This mostly benign snapping behavior probably accounts for the anecdotal comments by many end-users who report that their "GPS is working fine."
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
I ran a performance check yesterday and on 80 km drive it gave me an average accuracy of 5,2 m. with a very power hungry but very sensitive location update algorithm. I'm pretty impressed by the performance.

My hypothesis is that much problems are caused by how often a gps app is "notified" by the GPS. Less updates means less average accuracy. (To see this, take a extreme case of 2 updates per minute. If one update stumbles upon a great loss of accuracy, while the accuracy is fine for say 50 seconds, the average accuracy would be very, very bad). The developer has to set the update frequency him/herself and the API docs explicitely advices the developer to set the value to a pretty low value, because high update values consume very much battery power.

In an app like google maps I see that they update the position in a economic way, meaning, not too many updates per time unit. This can be justified because people tend to use googlemaps on battery power alone. Navigation apps on the other hand can be designed to receive much more navigation updates because one can assume that navigation apps will be feed by a car-charger. This, plus the snapping to roads as noted by others can explain the more precise behavior of navigation apps.

btw I also had some very bad results with google maps on my HD2, but with Navigators like Tomtom or copilot or tracking programs like OziEplorer, which I used for hiking I always (mostly) had some good results.

---

My guess is is that the GPS of the Galaxy isn't fine-tuned yet for the way Android apps are using the GPS.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Kilack:
Yes, yes.. less updates less accuracy... unless of course the gps is accurate and doesn't throw curve balls back all the time. As I stand with a nexus one in one hand on my drive and a galaxy in the other hand, the nexus has me in the drive.. wow imagine that.. the galaxy has me bouncing to my neighbours then over the road then back then to different neighbours.

Perhaps if we poll constantly and throw out data that we think is wrong we might get somewhere but funny how the nexus among other phones work a lot better...

As I said I tried a handful of phones with vodafone here and they weren't impressed at all with the gps in this phone.

Anyway I'm just going to sit back and wait for this fix that samsung uk are talking about, seems it will be the only way it will get fixed properly. I think it has been pretty clearly established by now there are definite problems in this unit and its been gone over so many times now.

I really hope they do have a fix and its not just delaying....
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
Yes, lets hope they come up with something.

But do you have a nexus one? I posted a little app a few posts back. Can you try that on your Nexus one? I just want to know why I can't any report on the galaxy about the data I refered to in that post... and according to the various gps docs these are pretty important data.

If you want you can also test the attached app, which is a little modification of the previous one. This one will also keep track of the minimal Snr value for fixed sats. Please test it with and without aGPS enabled.

(I can confirm that all that is claimed about the gps, e.g. that it never locks on to more than 10 and never locks on a sat with a snr < 20 is true. I did more than several tests while driving, and never the values indicate that this claim could be wrong. But again, confirmation is easier than falsification..)

Anyway, I will refrain from doing any more speculations on this subject.:) It is clear for me that it is difficult to make general statements about the performance of the gps. I find it strange that you got a accuracy of 50m. Only in some very exceptional cases I had that same problem. Maybe I just got lucky till now... Maybe the problem is that when the conditions are a little bit bad for any GPS the Galaxy GPS will fail completely....
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beards:
I contacted Chris Love this morning and here's the latest:-

Mike

I have spoken to Richard here and first line support at Samsung, who confirm that as yet the fix has not been uploaded

I await a call back from the product manager to try are finally resolve this issue

I am told they have the fix, which is bizarre if they have not released it.

Regards

Chris Love

Clove Technology

TEL: +44 (0)1202 552936

FAX: +44 (0)1202 552937

Email: sales@clove.co.uk

Website: www.clove.co.uk

Blog: blog.clove.co.uk
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Kilack:
Beards,

Thanks for keeping us informed.

bizarre... yes indeed, I can think of some other words too :).

Let us know if you hear anything else..does seem strange if they have a fix and are just sitting on it. Fishy?? we will see..
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
They will first have to face the Kies problem :) or they should choose for another update route.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] PsiIion:
Having an implementation of the fix does not mean they have a new firmware release ready.

I don't think they expect the users to do frequent flashing, and they probably want OTA-updates to work from next fix onwards...and maybe they are even trying to get rid of RFS if we are lucky. Even if they implemented everything they feel they need to include in next update, it still will take some time doing QA.

I just hope that it's correct that they have a fix...it's better that they try to do the job properly than rush a release.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
SamsungUK announced on twitter an upload via Kies a week ago. We were instructed to keep an eye on Kies. Now isn't Kies really worth to look at for longer than a second, but anyway...
[Galaxy S I9000 General] robnil:
Today i hade my first encounter with bad gps. The other tests have worked out fine. My problem is not like what others have descriped though.

The fix is rather quick, the direction and speed looked correct as well, but it was offsetted with over 1000 m in google maps.

Oddly enough, when I started the wifi-radio the position was soon adjusted to an acceptable one.

Thing is, wifi cant have anything to do with gps, unless they somehow share the same antenna?! Triangulation is done via the cell-towers, not the wifi. And there are no way you could position from wifi-hotspots here. For a start there are no known wifi-hotspots.

Just wanted to share my experience
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beowulf_pt:
You must be kidding. "Doing QA"? You still think they have any decent QA processes implemented, considering the state at which the GPS funcionality was released (even with all the associated services like Layer being advertised and the current fad on location-enabled services).

If there is a QA team, I'd fire everyone responsible for the navigation test management (and I work in SQA).
[Galaxy S I9000 General] appelflap:
Just checked Samsung UK's twitter page. Someone asked:

and in response to that SamsungUK twittered:

Are they just fine-tuning Google maps for the use with the GPS and is that the solution Samsung offers?
[Galaxy S I9000 General] TravUK:
Unless the current state of the GPS comes from a mistake in the release procedure. Plus I suspect the bulk of the QA is likely done by the GPS supplier, with a team of perpetually jet-lagged engineers traveling around the globe testing the GPS in remote corners of the world.

Just a guess. :rolleyes:
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beowulf_pt:
I sense a certain compassion for Broadcom boffins there Trav, certainly just a coincidence. :D

Fine. But at least they should inform us of something. At least release some videos showing that current competitors like also have lousy GPS performance (will be hard, just saw some tracks from another HTC Desire and they were amazingly precise). Plus forcing an engineer or two to jump out the window is also a fairly accept procedure for inspiring the teams to pay more attention to quality assurance in future products.

Oh, and putting an antenna in the gadget might help too.
[Galaxy S I9000 General] TravUK:
The GPS guys may be my colleagues, but my compassion only goes so far :)
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beowulf_pt:
Just a typical nonsense reply from support that is unaware of the issue or just doesn't read the complaint. They get lots of nonsense (I thank God I don't work at support) so sometimes it does not surprise me that their replies are that useless or just a copy&paste from some remotely related FAQ bit.

Just ignore those. I'm sure Samsung/Broadcom has good info on this by now (if a driver will fix it, if they're screwed and only a hardware recall would do, etc) but that never reaches the front lines for fear or scaring the crows that are currently spitting out good money for their flagship model.

The HTC Desire tracks I just received from a user were just impressive.. you can tell the lane the car is on, very precise, roundabouts, everything. Haven't got this sharp even with my old Holux external GPS. In any case the HTCies are now complaining about lag and browser slowdowns introduced in the official 2.2

I think I'll give up on modern technology and go back to a 39.90€ Nokia. Calls+SMS, flawless. :D
[Galaxy S I9000 General] Beowulf_pt:
Just let them know that when the revolution comes we know who will be the first ones put against the wall. And instead of bullets we'll be throwing TomTom and Garmin stand alone units. With the chargers. The end will take a lot longer and will hurt more.

PS: Unless they fix it all in the next 20 days. Tip: Hire 2 or 3 guys from HTC. It's not all that far from Korea.