newbenzowner

I have a 2001 C240 with navigation system and most of the time it will read 00 Satellites...miraculously it will still track me on the correct road and give me good directions.

However, sometimes in this situation, it will have my car some 40-50 miles from my current location, traveling in the middle of rivers, off road -- all over the place.

The service mechanic told me that when this occurs the military has taken over all the GPS satellites for the war effort. I find this explanation rather hard to believe and think that the mechanic just did not want to fix my system.

Can anyone provide any guidance on this. Thanks

sosh

Thats a poor explanation and not true. What you most likely have is a bad antenna or antenna connection. I use GPS all the time in my aircraft and also on my boat. Never failed me. I also have not seen a failure in my ML500. While the MB system shows you the number of satellites received it does not give you signal strength. What could be happening is your unit is receiving, but not enough to count the satellite but enough to give the GPS unit enough to roughly resolve your position intermittently. Get it checked out!!

JohnAMG

That is one of the best lame excuse from a dealer tech, LOL!!! My COMAND receive 6-8 satellites all the time, dosen't matter if the military is either looking for Saddam or Osama. And my COMAND is a retrofitted job. Does your Teleaid work? Can Teleaid pin point your location when you activate it? I believe Teleaid and the COMAND are using the same GPS antenna source. If C-class is like E-class then the a splitter is run from the Teleaid module to the COMAND. My assumption is if the Teleaid can locate you( which means the antenna is functional) then your COMAND is defective. Go back and demand a fix. You paid $2000 for the COMAND and it better work flawlessly.

John

newbenzowner

Thanks for the responses....I thought I was getting jerked around... Jeez, did he think I wouldn't check on this???

awiner

I had this SAME EXACT problem and had to have my whole COMAND unit replaced under warranty at 1700 miles.

Lynn

The Air Force has the ablility to turn on a feature of GPS called Selective Availability. The current policy set by Presidential directive is that SA is to remain off and it has been off for quite some time. SA can degrade the Clear Access (CA) signal from the satellites to the point where it is useless. However, even when SA was being used, the official policy was that the positional accuracies were never to exceed 100 meters. Most of the time SA was set to 16 meters or less and was not used on all satellites. SA works by degrading the accuracy of the broadcast time signal, and the accuracy of the broadcast satellite ephemerides (orbital positions of the satellites).