Due to the rainy weather havent switched on the p4 for 4 days, when i switched it on today, the default location b4 acquiring the GPS signal was somewhere in west african desert, am in England and its quite a few thousand miles away.

Thick clouds and a few minutes, the gps fix was fine and the location updated fine but the path line on the map went all the way from uk to africa, looked like the bird had travelled all the way from there.

There has been some reports of the home point suddenly jumping to a point few hundred or thousand kms away mid flight, would this have to do anything with the initial state....
Any one with gps knowledge throw some light on this please ?

Could it have been 0°00'00.0"N 0°00'00.0"E by any chance?

I was going to be witty and say don't you mean 0°00'00.0"S 0°00'00.0"W, but thought better of it.

It's a bit scary though that apparently, under some circumstances, the P4 is grabbing an invalid GPS location.  Maybe the OP did a firmware update and that reset the default location to, as you suggest, all 0s.

jstjohnz Posted at 2016-5-11 18:58
I was going to be witty and say don't you mean 0°00'00.0"S 0°00'00.0"W...

Good thing you never

jstjohnz Posted at 2016-5-11 18:58
I was going to be witty and say don't you mean 0°00'00.0"S 0°00'00.0"W, but thought better of it.
...

The fw update was done when it was released, so quite a few weeks and have a few flights after....

Just that i noticed this weird thing today when it was jumping locations b4 acquiring the gps lock.... so was wo dering what was going on..?

If it thinks it's in Nigeria your FW is probably "fantastically corrupt"

visitkans Posted at 2016-5-12 08:14
The fw update was done when it was released, so quite a few weeks and have a few flights after.... ...

"i noticed this weird thing today when it was jumping locations b4 acquiring the gps lock"

The key there is that what you noticed was before the Phantom had a good GPS fix.
You are just seeing the rough working as it goes from zero satellites (all the zeros) to a couple of sats and then to a proper sat fix.
Before getting a GPS fix, the Phantom knows that it doesn't have a fix and it will not record a home point until it does.
The very few recent cases of jumping home points were not related.
they were in the middle of a flight and jumped 1-2 kilometres.

labroides@yahoo Posted at 2016-5-12 00:30
"i noticed this weird thing today when it was jumping locations b4 acquiring the gps lock"

The ke ...

Makes sense,

The reason for asking is that in tablets and phones, the last location is shown until a good fix is acquired.

Have you flown in the last couple of days as we have had good weather in the UK, did the P4 perform?

nigelw Posted at 2016-5-11 13:09
Could it have been 0°00'00.0"N 0°00'00.0"E by any chance?

The exact same thing happens to me quite frequently, and its in different places. It shows my bird flying miles long routes on the map...before I take off. Its like the GPS doesnt know where it is...and this is with GPS satellite lock. Ill post the HealthyDrones upload to show you what hes talking about as soon as I get to a PC this evening.

Exib Posted at 2016-5-12 09:10
Have you flown in the last couple of days as we have had good weather in the UK, did the P4 perform?

Flying after getting a lock has been fine.... was just curious as to what that was...

FatedFilmsNC Posted at 2016-5-12 14:02
The exact same thing happens to me quite frequently, and its in different places. It shows my bird ...

This is interesting... following now..

I've seen this behaviour when the GPS isn't locked, i.e inside without a view of the sky. Mine shows a journey that goes far to the west, over and about Southern Russia. If you're getting a GPS SAFE TO FLY when it's wrong I'd worry, if not then likely no issues.

I had a home point jump on me last week while doing a RTH.
12 GPS hits and on a clear no wind day.
I switched to manual to fly back and then the home point jumped back to where it should be.
Seems some new code to the app introduced this issue.
Not sure this will be addressed at all, but there is something off within the app now.