Thanks for trying that. That's a bummer.
Unfortunately, even though Qualcomm says that all "gpsOne" cores are capable of being operated completely standalone, that doesn't mean that the software that controls the core actually allows it to do so. To make matters worse, it seems that in most phones the GPS firmware is part of the "radio image" - and the source code for that is never released.
(There have been radio firmware hacks - for instance for the HTC Mogul - that actually turned on the GPS chip even though HTC had disabled it completely on that phone - but radio hacks are pretty fussy things - patching binaries without any sources is tedious and error prone work.)
If you were to lobby anyone to do change this for you, it should be HTC - put in a request to them.
The strange thing is - I have experimented with recording GPS tracks (driving 5-10 miles) with the cell radio turned off on the Eris, and it seemed to work correctly ... but a probable flaw with my testing was that I hadn't traveled very far from the last place where I got a fix (with the radio on). Even standalone GPS units (such as Marine GPS) use a standard trick of "assume you are at the last location where a successful fix was made" when starting up, and that reduces the amount of time required to come up with the next fix, so long as the distances between the actual location and the "last known good" location are not too far apart.
The reason that mobile phones use A-GPS modes, whether an "initial kick" or more than that, is to decrease the first fix time. It might be that HTC has concluded that if they can not get A-GPS services from the local network, that it is "better" to just turn off the GPS completely... "better" meaning they will have fewer customers claiming "my phone is erratic".
One more thing that you might want to try, if you still have any patience left dealing with this, is try:
- turning the cell radio off ( *#*#4636#*#* thing )
- use the GPS Status (EclipSim) App
- manually make sure that the phone does not sleep for 7-8 minutes
- Check the reported Lat/Lon against an online tool ( maps.google.com )
Standalone GPS units can take 5-6 minutes to acquire a first fix from a "cold start" condition - unless an app specifically keeps the phone awake, the GPS unit will sleep as well. (Google's "My Tracks" app will keep the GPS unit running even during screen blank).
Anyway... thanks for the report.
eu1
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