keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal

My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal I use TomTom for GPS navigation. I now-a-days face a lot of signal problems during my journey in the car. Most of the time my TomTom doesn't pick up the satellites gps signal. I can see it is loading and looking for gps signal but sooner I get the message saying it is waiting for valid GPS signals and nothing happens. I never had this problem until last week. Can you help me in this matter? Reply With Quote #2 Old 14-06-2010 GhostRider's Avatar GhostRider GhostRider is offline Member Join Date: Feb 2008 Posts: 773 Re: My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal What version of TomTom are you currently using? You can check this by going into the GPS status and then GPS tab. If you are having an older version then use the update CD. Also make sure that the TomTom wireless GPS and bluetooth serial port COM has been selected. Reply With Quote #3 Old 14-06-2010 Grohu's Avatar Grohu Grohu is offline Member Join Date: May 2008 Posts: 671 Re: My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal On which port is your TomTom set to? Is it port 8? If not then set it. I am unsure if you also have the GPS search feature where you can find the port and vbaude automatically. If this doesn't solve your problem, then I think your TomTom is having low battery. You may even could have a damaged SIIRF chip but repair that is too expensive. Reply With Quote #4 Old 14-06-2010 arturro's Avatar arturro arturro is offline Member Join Date: May 2008 Posts: 611 Re: My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal There are many possibilities of TomTom not able to connect to the satellite. First of all make sure that you have clear direction to the sky, mostly this happens because of clouds which becomes an obstacle for getting the full signal strength. As you said when you started the TomTom, it took few seconds to find the gps device but then it showed waiting for valid gps signal; are you still getting the same message or does it now says no gps device found. Because in such case you may even think of some internal problem with the GPS receiver. Try to wait for few more seconds or even few minutes to see if it acquires any signals. Reply With Quote #5 Old 15-06-2010 Ricky58 Ricky58 is offline Member Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 643 Re: My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal I have seen a lot of people have such kind of problems and moreover they tried SiRFDemo for some experimental purpose which resulted them with non-functional GPS receiver. I don't think that this is related to GPS firmware problem, which was suggested before by someone. I would suggest you to try removing the battery for certain period of time. This will reset your GPS receiver to factory defaults and you should be able to use it once again. Hope this helps! Reply With Quote #6 Old 17-06-2010 deveritt's Avatar deveritt deveritt is offline Member Join Date: Apr 2008 Posts: 2,528 Re: My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal I think you should give some time to your TomTom to acquire the signals. Because as you might be knowing satellites doesn't stay constant at one place but instead move out of line. Thus your GPS receiver has to keep track of these satellites and also has to look out of for more when those are not found. If it doesn't find anyone of them then it has to redo the same process once again. Reply With Quote #7 Old 28-06-2011 erhammond erhammond is offline Member Join Date: Jun 2011 Posts: 1 Re: My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal The night before I was going on a trip I connected my TomTom XL 310 to my computer and was prompted to update to the latest software. I did so and added some favorites. The next day after we got on our way we powered up the TomTom only to find that it was unable to acquire any satellites and we were unable to use it for the entire trip. I found out afterwards that the software update had rendered the device useless. We had to do a “Reset to Factory Settings” to get the device to work again and in the process lost of of the data we had entered. I am a software developer and am disgusted with the fact that they would release software the would render the device useless. I will never buy another product from this company. Reply With Quote #8 Old 29-06-2011 Spyrus's Avatar Spyrus Spyrus is offline Member Join Date: May 2008 Posts: 3,494 Re: My TomTom can't find any satellites and keeps saying waiting for valid gps signal I have never heard of a driver update problem in TomTom before? Does not driver update mean getting the latest and proper support for the hardware or device, but reading from the case above it is totally reversed. I would only guess that this might be a case of a faulty TomTom, so if it is under warranty get it replaced. Reply With Quote