What about hundreds of cell phones simultaneously searching for a tower at full signal strength?. I haven't experienced any issues when it's just me and my instructor but add 200 more people to the mix. I would love to have some sort of closure to this.
Consensus: Will leaving GPS ON consume more battery life?
- Thread starter akarol
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What about hundreds of cell phones simultaneously searching for a tower at full signal strength?. I haven't experienced any issues when it's just me and my instructor but add 200 more people to the mix. I would love to have some sort of closure to this.
I thought you had to allow Google to do that. They can't just do it without your consent. That's a huge invasion of privacy. I don't think I checked the 2 boxes when registering my Google account with the phone, so that wouldn't be an issue.
However, other applications such as Weather Bug, Yelp!, etc. will use the satellites rather than using the antennas to triangulate my position, thus consuming more power.
Bottom line, I wish there was a way to list programs that you allow GPS to be enabled for. Any apps that will do this?
Answer: The signal from your handset has very low power and operates on a different band than A/C radios.
But consider this, you already have hundred of land based cell towers with more powerful transmitters essentially on at all times. While those signal are weak at altitude, we fly through all of them at full power when making our VFR/IFR/ILS approach. If those would interfere with any com or nav equipment (civilian or military) we would have seen thousands airplane landing crashes all over the world already. Have you?
Yes that is very strange. Not only that, once on airplane mode you can manually turn back on your wifi, hotspot radios as well.
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Good answer, mind if I quote you?
Not at all...
I feel the cell phone ban is not based on any rational thought or empiric information. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I was I will have to say the ban has more to do with airlines selling their inflight phone service than operational safety issue.
Not at all...
I feel the cell phone ban is not based on any rational thought or empiric information. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I was I will have to say the ban has more to do with airlines selling their inflight phone service than operational safety issue.
The FCC bans cell phones in flight too. Something about zooming through lots of towers would disrupt the cell network.
I'd thought that the FAA actually lifted it's ban, but evidently not: Fact Sheet (from the FAA site)
Now that the batt life thing was made much better with the update, I started turning things back on.
Now with the Always on Mobile Data enabled and GPS on all the time and the selection for allowing the location to be known or whatever it is called, makes little to no noticable diff in batt life
Now with the Always on Mobile Data enabled and GPS on all the time and the selection for allowing the location to be known or whatever it is called, makes little to no noticable diff in batt life
I understand, but the issue is that some programs wouldn't normally utilize the GPS antenna if it was disabled (Yelp, WeatherBug, Weather Widget, etc). Instead, it uses the carrier's towers to triangulate your position.
So having the GPS antenna on, does consume more battery when running applications you wouldn't normally want/need satellites to find you.
So having the GPS antenna on, does consume more battery when running applications you wouldn't normally want/need satellites to find you.
It's going to depend on the app. Weatherbug has a setting to tell it to use GPS or not. So if you tell it not to use GPS, it won't, even if the GPS radio is turned on.
But yes, if you have apps that ping against the GPS, that will increase battery usage. How much will depend on how often, and your location. Updating weatherbug once an hour, while outdoors, isn't likely to use much power. Updating it every 10 minutes, when you're indoors and have a very weak signal from the satellites, will use more.
But yes, if you have apps that ping against the GPS, that will increase battery usage. How much will depend on how often, and your location. Updating weatherbug once an hour, while outdoors, isn't likely to use much power. Updating it every 10 minutes, when you're indoors and have a very weak signal from the satellites, will use more.
There was also a high end Garmin unit (can't recall the model number right now) that had similar problem with the onboard com radio causing it to loose the sat signal when tuned to the lower frequencies... seemed a problem with the antena installation if I recall correctly.
The drain mostly comes from the apps who use the radios. Okay, 3G/4G/Wifi consumes a lot because they need rather powerful signals to maintain a decent bidirectional bandwidth, but in case of GPS, it's just like your communications radio.
When GPS is in a passive state (just listening), it uses about the same amount of power as your communcations radio does. The drain happens when apps are requesting your GPS position. When using the GPS actively, most of the calculations/processing/drain happens outside of the GPS radio itself. The GPS radio only handles requests and delivers its position as (kind of) coordinates. It's the app who interprets the incoming coordinates, outputs them in a human form, looks up where those coordinates are located, requests and fetchs the address, requests and fetchs map data, draws the map, ... It's easy to spot where the work/drain really happens.
There are alternatives to have less active time on your GPS. It mostly comes down to a table of cell towers with their position and a table of Wifi network locations (thanks to an "accident" by the Google Streef View team
)) ). It can be less accurate, but for most apps, there's no need for a locatoin with an accuracy of let's say 10 meters. For let's say a weather app or a local news app, city-level positions would do just fine.
Cheers!
When GPS is in a passive state (just listening), it uses about the same amount of power as your communcations radio does. The drain happens when apps are requesting your GPS position. When using the GPS actively, most of the calculations/processing/drain happens outside of the GPS radio itself. The GPS radio only handles requests and delivers its position as (kind of) coordinates. It's the app who interprets the incoming coordinates, outputs them in a human form, looks up where those coordinates are located, requests and fetchs the address, requests and fetchs map data, draws the map, ... It's easy to spot where the work/drain really happens.
There are alternatives to have less active time on your GPS. It mostly comes down to a table of cell towers with their position and a table of Wifi network locations (thanks to an "accident" by the Google Streef View team
)) ). It can be less accurate, but for most apps, there's no need for a locatoin with an accuracy of let's say 10 meters. For let's say a weather app or a local news app, city-level positions would do just fine.Cheers!
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