On Wednesday, November 23, 2016 at 8:08:52 PM UTC-5, Dan Marotta wrote:
It worked fine last time I flew but today, it was stuck on the startup
screen with 0 Satellites showing. I cycled the power a couple of times
with no effect. Both my ClearNav vario and my Dell Streak were both
receiving good GPS locks. The Streak reported 8 satellites.

The PF Portable had been stuck on my glare shield using Dual Lok
fasteners but, a few days ago I fabricated an aluminum plate to bolt the
portable to and then screw the plate to the glare shield. That should
make no difference, but I thought I would tell all.

Being new to this, I have no idea where or how to look for faults. The
PF receives switched power from the DC bus. It has 3 antennae hooked to
it, and its serial port is connected to one of the inputs of a
K6BT-Mux. The other input of the Mux is connected to the serial output
of the CN vario. The Bluetooth radio transmits to the Dell Streak
running XCSoar. On the Streak, I can monitor the interface traffic out
of the Mux. I saw sentences from the Flarm and the ClearNav vario. The
data stream from the CNv had good GPS information and the $PF sentences
appeared to have zeros instead of position data. That would agree with
the startup screen.

It's my understanding that, absent a good GPS signal of its own, the PF
portable should use the GPS data from the vario.

Can anyone offer any advice?
--
Dan, 5J

I would try your Portable with a known working PowerFLARM GPS antenna - I have seen one bad antenna which we tracked down this way.

Have you redone the PowerFLARM firmware within 365 days? "From the March 2015 Update, every FLARM device needs to be updated with the latest firmware version at least once per year (rolling 365 days)." - from the FLARM.com website.

If you can get a .igc file out of it, in the header it says what type of gps it is, HFGPSType: (usually a 16-channel LEA-6A or NEO-6Q GPS receiver by u-blox of Switzerland). If the type is missing, likely a gps problem.

I would be very surprised/shocked if it accepted any external GPS signals from the vario, since it can be an IGC Flight Recorder (with the proper licencing)...

Dan
2D