What a trip!

Just had a fairly fraught trip from Peterborough to Glasgow and back, where – in addition to bad weather – my TomTom (Go Live 1005 World Edition) refused to see any satellites whatsoever.

I tried various things, numerous times, including a reboot and a complete factory reset, but it stayed perpetually searching. while my phone and tablet both were picking up satellites galore. In the end, the phone got me through the trip, using Google Navigation. This meant my (work) phone took a small hit on mobile data, but as it was a work trip anyway, that’s not an issue.

Now safely back home, the TomTom is still the same. It is sitting in my polycarbonate-roofed conservatory (so clear view of satellites), next to my tablet. The tablet is getting a signal from 18 satellites, 5 of them strong, while TomTom has absolutely nothing – not just no fix, but not one satellite.

I’m getting it replaced via Amazon. My first thought was to talk to TomTom, and this is also what Amazon preferred; but the device is only 3 weeks short of 1 year old, and I don’t want to waste time with TomTom, only to be told by Amazon “sorry, our year’s warranty has expired”. And, yes, I would argue that a device of this value warrants more than a year, but I decided to bypass that discussion by just sating to Amazon “it’s broke, it’s under warranty, replace it”. My contract is with them, not TomTom.

One thing I found a bit strange, that I had had no cause to notice before. I noticed that the date/time was something in 2010, and figuring that it might affect the coordination with satellites, thought I would try to set it as accurate as possible manually. The Amazon guy also asked me to do this when troubleshooting.

With this device, there is no way to manually set it straight to a given date (at least no way I can see). All you can do is advance (or reverse) the date with an onscreen button push. Which meant to get from January 2010 to today, I had to push the button over a thousand times, stepping through each day in turn!

This seems really dumb to me; unless it’s me that is dumb, and there is a simple alternative method that I didn’t see.

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