I've heard this mentioned a couple of times on the forum.

Why does the Spark often take a while to acquire a GPS signal ?

I have a answer, well sort of. Of course trees and buildings will affect your ability to acquire a GPS signal but there is a little unknown fact about GPS that people have seen to forgotten.

Do you remember before we had fancy mobile phones that had data connections ? When you had a GPS unit in the car ? It would often take 3-5 mins to lock on to a GPS signal?

This is because when you first start a GPS device that not connected to the internet or a cell tower it firsts has to acquire special data files named Almanac and Ephemeris.

The data is sent out every 30 seconds, but the GPS device first has to read the Almanac for *each* satellite and then the Ephemeris data after that for an exact lock. The data is valid for 30 mins, so this is why if you turned off your device and turn it back on it doesn’t require as long to sync GPS lock again!

When it comes to mobile phones, google maps and mobile phone providers cache this information at the local cell tower locations for general use (why your phone is quick to pick this up). My guess is that if your phone connection is slow or in airplane mode the spark has to collect the Almanac and Ephemeris data manually which is why sometimes it can take for ever for the GPS lock to happen.

Check out http://gpsinformation.net/main/almanac.txt  

for an old article about it.

Thanks for sharing this. And if it takes a long time to acquire a GPS signal or search satellites, pilots might need to move the drone to a wide area, sometimes different period of time and type of weather might also affect the capacity of searching satellites.

It's not just the sparks that does this, your location have a lot to do to about it.

I have wondered why when swapping to a new battery it connects to GPS almost instantly, but when flying with the first battery at a new location it takes FOREVER. Thanks for the info.

When i struggle with GPS I move the drone, it could be 1 metre or 10 but it always seems to find GPS after that.

Thanks for this

It's spark takes more time than other Dji drone?

This is great information - thanks for sharing.

Lucas775 Posted at 2017-10-12 18:48
It's not just the sparks that does this, your location have a lot to do to about it.

Lucas but how is that when mine was new connection was fast now it takes sometimes 20% battery before gps connection ...and yes after switching to fresh battery its connected immediatly