I had a friend with a GPS unit that died because of Y2K in the middle of a search and rescue in the Great Sandy Desert in Australia, I think that thats the correct name. Man he was pissed lol
I remember when the first Magellan NAV 1000 units first came out in 1989. They were almost $3,000. In 1994 I got one of the early handheld Garmin GPS units for $200. It was basic by current standards but it was an improvement over LORAN and it helped me get from Oregon to Manzanillo, MX in an old sailboat.
Many other manufacturers issued a software patch to work around the 10bit week rollover problem. I have several TomTom SatNav units (2007-2009 vintage) that are patched for the rollover issue and working fine. Official support is no longer available from TomTom - but so far the enthusiast community has been able to make current Map Updates available. Units still detect and lock onto up to 8 satellites
I used the Garmin version of this for years. Around 2003, I got a serial port adapter for mine, and would plug it into my laptop. I'd then open Microsoft Mappoint, and it'd show my position on the map in REAL TIME. Mind blowing. Also got an Orinoco network card and did some "war driving".
@@PsRohrbaugh No. I just had a similar set up myself inspired by a video. Does "The Broken" and "Kevin Rose" mean anything to you? :) If not, ignore that. I had a Magellan SporTrak Topo, serial cable, Orinoco Gold wireless card, external WiFi antenna, MS Mappoint, and NetStumbler. Had a lot of fun. I also remember using a program called XPort to input serial port data into NetStumbler and Mappoint at the same time.
@@SharpBalisong xport is the only part of this comment that I don't have some sort of memory of. We always did netstumblet while driving, and didn't mess with Mappoint until back home. One time we found a dentists office with Linksys / Linksys Wi-Fi. Completely unsecured SMB shares. With all sorts of billing information and patient records. We connected to their printers, and submitted dozens of print jobs (each for hundreds of pages) saying that their Wi-Fi / network were insecure and they needed to hire professionals to do things like set passwords / change default passwords. That was one of our last nights wardriving, and I always wonder what things were like that next morning. Getting old is weird. That feels like last year, you know? Nope 2 decades have gone by.
The strap is not a neck strap. It's a shoulder strap so you could sling it across your body and would rest over your hip and easy to grab and check your track at a glance.
@@micahhawcroft1994 Keep in mind early GPS handhelds like this were a navigation aid and not intended for absolute navigation since the signals were intentionally limited to a 30m accuracy. If you were trekking wilderness without a paper map back then you were asking for trouble. This isn't to say that having only a 30m error was considered super accurate back then since such distances were well within line of sight
Had a similar one as an EMT back in the 90s. Great when you were in a rural area and had to call in a helicopter ambulance for transport. Used it a couple of times for that...
My friend got one of the prior versions of this, pretty much the first one allowed after GPS was opened to civilian use. When they first came out. He owned a (tiny) sporting goods company, and got it for a decent discount... from the list price of around two grand. I think he paid about $1200 for it. We used it, in conjunction with hand-plotted points on a USGS quadrant map, to navigate the mountains around Death Valley. That was one hell of an expedition, I can tell you... especially with the "built in error" in the system. It worked out pretty damn well, especially since the Magellan sort of "cheated" and gave the correct location to about 10' most of the time. We had a blast playing with that thing, even though we didn't entirely trust it and did our own plotting based on known landmarks and compass headings.
A fun video! I still have my Magellan 2000 (and its leather case). I used it for microlight flying in the late '90s. Its main purpose was to help guide my flight back overhead to the field where I'd left the car and trailer; which it did beautifully. Its value now is purely sentimental!
I have an older version of this (Magellan GPS Pioneer) with a big antenna lumb on top and a very large green reflective LCD display. Still acquires GPS. Also have the original box and VHS tape that was included with instructions. This device had a strange battery compartment 2 B used with 2 AA cells. They made it in a way you would expect the batteries to be paralleled but one actually has to be placed the other way around with the top (+) against the spring. Weird they did that. Beautiful device with graphical interface and looks of a modern satellite phone.
what a blast from the past: I used these in 1995 (I'm an OG). You have no idea what this meant to us planning aerial animal control operations. We used it to plot points then transfer to a map then give it to the helicopter pilot and he used those points to lay the poison bait!
@@JaredConnellPeople use helicopters to herd all types of livestock. There's some pretty cool videos if your search "helicopter mustering" They're talking about using poison though, I'm assuming against some invasive species
I'm old enough to remember the early days of GPS... I always knew it was just a system that let you determine your location on Earth. It never occurred to me that younger people might assume the maps were sent from the satellite as well! That would be cool but impractical considering the complete broadcast of just the ephemeris data for the satellites takes a full 12 minutes. Most phones actually download that data from the internet as well so they can get a fix faster.
The misconception is not new. When navigation on phones was a new thing, I remember people complaining that it’s “not real GPS” because you needed internet access to download the maps. Some people also think that the satellites can calculate your location if you use a GPS… most people have no idea how the technology they rely on everyday works even at a surface level.
With a UART connection you'd be able to program it and ultimately program the date. Yes, you'd need to take it apart, but it would be cool to see it working again.
I just took out my old Magellan 310 and it still could pick up a fix!!! I checked it with my smartphone with a GPS app and the coordinates are very close! The buttons have become really unresponsive after more than two decades. But it functions the same as when I used it before. Of course, it pales in comparison to today's smartphones. It took me about 15 minutes to initialize like before and I had to input my rough location / time. But yeah, it still works for now. Maybe someday, it will face another limitation and stop working.
The 15min is just the max time it takes to download the full gps Almanach, I belive. This was a normal time before AGPS was a thing. I remember a Nokia N95 without an active internet connection used to take almost as long. Old tomtoms weren't better, either lol.
Unresponsive buttons are a common issue with electronics from the time. I restore vintage game consoles as a hobby and fixing that is actually pretty simple. Take it apart, wipe the contacts with 99.9% IPA. Then add some IPA to the graphite pad (the dark circle) on the rubber membrane, carefully drag it over a piece of paper two or three times and that's about it. Reassemble and it will be responsive again. Works on game controllers, remote controls, keypads and the like.
Don't need to rub the contacts on paper. That is a myth. It doesn't matter if the carbon contacts are shiny, as long as they have been cleaned with IPA. A couple hundred handheld consoles fixed. The rubber membranes are unobtainium. Don't risk damage.
@@JohnGotts I've done it countless times and it works fine. Only time something ripped was a Mega Drive controller dpad membrane that was so worn that the nipples already had massive tears anyway.
How odd... Magellan copied the look and layout of the Garmin GPS 40 that I had significant e-design responsibilities for. The early GPS development days were exciting. During the development of our first product, the GPS 100, all of the engineers took the prototype outside and waited for our first ever position fix... and waited... because there were only a very few L1 capable birds up - way back then. We had to wait quite a while for at least 3 satellites to become visible, and with good enough DOP... but it finally happened! That was an exciting day, for sure! It was a few months later before there were sufficient L1 satellites to get a full 3D fix (if I remember correctly... that's been a long while back!) After working on the GPS40/45, I also worked on the electronic design for the early GPS 20 and 25 sensors. Garmin is an incredible company to work for... they have always really really cared about the people that work there. When I started (#13), it felt very much like a family... and as much as possible for such a huge company, they still do today. I haven't been there for the entire life of the company, but I'm back there now after a 23 year time away, but I was reinstated with all of my previous years worked - almost like I had never left... full benefits, the same full retirement vesting that I had when I left... HOW MANY PLACES WOULD DO THAT?... unless they care about their people?
I wish I lived near the plant myself, but I am a long time Garmin user. My GPS 32X works great, and I am planning on adding an external antenna port with iso-tee for an active antenna that can be remote mounted. Being a 40 year RF engineer helps in modifying receivers.
There was this "Y2K Like Bug" scare in 2019 which was supposed to kill off all old GPS devices. My Tomtom GO and Navman S30 from 2004/5 work perfectly fine.
Likely it depends on the particular firmware, and how robust it was made by the programmer. Smart programmers would have known to use a larger counter. However that introduces some extra complexity into the programming so many programmers would have avoided it assuming the devices simply wouldn't be in use after 10 or 20 years - which is likely true, but not always. The really frustrating ones are the ones that are factory units built into cars. That's why I object so strongly to the "infotainment" being so deeply integrated now, it's yet another thing that lead to planned obsolescence of cars.
This video had me worried that my old toys would just stop working --- even if I haven't touched or used them in, well, probably a decade. I broke out my Garmin etrex Vista C from early 2005. It works great! It took about 10 minutes to find 4 satellites and then popped up. All my old tracks, waypoints, etc are still stored and accessible. I have an older Garmin III I can try, too.
Good thing I'm Irish. My Garmin GPS III+ also works from 1999 --- but claimed memory battery low and that contents were erased, unfortunately! It came up from a cold start in just a few minutes.
I knew someone who had a unit *like* that in the early 2000s. Probably not the same model, but it was huge and only gave coordinates. She was *really* into it. When she first came to visit me she asked for the GPS coordinates of my house, for example. Also used it for geoCaching.
It's interesting, I wonder at what point they fixed this in later GPS's to keep them working after these rollovers? I have an old Garmin StreetPilot III from 2001 that's went through the 2019 rollover and it not only still works, but reports the current date accurately.
I have GPS receivers from the very early 2000s that show the wrong date, but otherwise work fine. I think this was always the expectation. It sounds like this specific receiver (and probably many other old ones) has a bug related to handling this issue.
Your video encouraged me to dig out my old 2000XL (looks the same) to see if it still worked. I set up the initialisation data and it sat outside for probably a couple of hours. It did, however, eventually get a fix!! The date is wrong, it shows 3rd Oct 2003 when it is actually 19th May 2023, but the time is correct. I suspect this clock issue may have been why it took so long to get a fix as I set the clock "incorrectly" (ie to the current date rather than what the GPS thinks is the date). So all is not lost. My GPS 2000XL works, just with the wrong date. I'll have to dig out my even older Silva GPS compass and see if it still works.
I found a GPS 2000 (non XL) in my cupboard - didn't remember having that. Must have had some issue with it way back then as it's basically new in box. Anyway, after 3 or 4 hours outside it managed to get a 3D fix! Sensitivity is terrible and it only showed about 5-6 stars on the status display (advertises a 12 channel receiver), but eventually got the 4 satellites required. Most of the time it was in and out of 2D (3 sats) mode. So summarising, it is pretty much unusable, but it *did* work again. You probably just didn't wait long enough. Cheers.
From the same era, Garmin made the GPS 38 handheld receiver. That one was updatable through the serial interface to fix the EOW bug. Thanks JR for the content!
I borrowed one of those from a friend in the early '2000s to find my first few Geocaches. Got hooked and got my own Garmin etrex legend. I still have a couple of handheld GPS's that I use regularly but my phone is actually my primary GPS now. As cool as those old ones were, you probably would not put up with their performance today.
I still occasionally use my old GPS315 (Magellan) and I was happy to find it still works. I even use it to map the constellation for setting up current generation module almanacs, mainly to avoid very low azimuth sats. It beats dragging the laptop outside.
I tried mine and it works for navigation, but it shows the wrong date. It looks like the date froze on a buffer overflow but leaves everything else still working. You can even manually set the moon phase and fishing times screen to the correct date.
One of my first aviation GPS's, was an Apollo Precedus II Morrow Handheld GPS. Similar package as that Magellan, but at the time, was way ahead of its time. Check one of those out, if you can find one cheap enough.
It will run continuously for 24 hours on the AA batteries not to mention that it’s waterproof. Mine still works fine, when you change the batteries it will take about 10 minutes for it to acquire a lock. Mine has a basic topo map with some highways and roads.
I have a Magellan GPS 315 which I used to back in the 1990s for plotting broadcast station monitor Point measurements all across the us. About 10 years ago I powered it up and it did not acquire any satellites. It seems like the format of the satellite data had changed sometime in the last 25 years.
This is incorrect. The week rollover problem is a real thing, but it does not cause vintage GPS navigators to stop working. I have several vintage units, going back to the Magellan NAV 1000, which is the first civilization GPS navigator sold in 1989, and they all work fine. What *does* happen is the unit will report the wrong date, but the actual positioning works perfectly. When you use a vintage unit for the first time after the memory is erased due to having no batteries in it, you need to leave it outside for a good hour before it finds a signal, because it's running on the vintage almanac data that tells it which satellites are in the sky, which of course is no good to it. So it has to find satellites manually until it can download a new almanac.
Yeah, I went to an outdoor school. SJSA, if you want some reading. We would devote the last month of school to a canoe trip about that long. A thousand or so KM one way. No real outside support. Mostly wilderness. My first exposure to early GPS was on those trips. One of the teachers would bust out a laminated map and plot where we were at day's end with the help of one of those early civilian units.
Magellan 2000 was our first GPS receiver , still remember that summer on the Cape horn as a child, and my dad telling me to shout him the position on the screen , it was a life saver when fog came in , along the old green display furuno radar , 20 years later we have chartplotters and waze on our cellphones , the Magellan 2000 was a milestone , it put the average Joe in contact with the GPS tech back then , had a NAV5000 too , from the 1st gulf war as a backup on the boat.
There was a data cable and battery eliminator that did just plug-in instead of the batteries as you said earlier but definitely had data in and out available and should be able to program it whether it’s supported or not any more that’s another matter definitely has data in an out in the battery compartment Definitely me to use it with a paper map. That’s why you do have all the different datum to match with the map Datum
A 2007 Garmin eTtrex Vista HCx started giving an incorrect date and time after the week rollover, but continued getting a (3D) fix and correct coordinates. After a firmware update is still works fine.
You should have bought a Garmin GPS12. I pulled mine out of storage and tried it. It WORKS!!!! It locked on to the satellites and gave a accurate position, elevation, and time. However the date is trash, today is 19 MAY 23 and the GPS12 says 03 OCT 03.
Most GPS receivers from this time period had a cable available from the manufacturer that gave the unit an RS-232 port and NEMA-82/83 data output...you could use that with a program like DeLorme maps and plop your laptop in the right seat of the car for a moving map 😊 Aviation ones had the same output, and built-in GPS receivers in aircraft used the NEMA data for an optional moving map (most of them gave you lat/long on the single line LCD display along with groundspeed, and could navigate you on a flight plan with outputs to a VOR OBS head). Probably in the very late 1990's the receivers started coming with B&W lcd displays (color for the deluxe models) that had a tiny built-in moving map display.
This showed up in my recommendations. Started watching it and thought man this guy really looks like WatchJRgo. Took me a minute to realize it actually was you.
Ran one of these on a motorbike back in the 90s.. connected to a Compaq Ipac running mapping software. Worked a treat, like Austin Powers.. map with a red dot on it.. No routing but it helps seeing where you are :-) We also used to run PMR radios with homemade headsets for bike to bike comms. It's a lot easier these days!
I keep mine in my gun cabinet to remind me of my earlier hunts. It worked well back then, It was a lot of money back then. Now I have 3 GPS units. I was hoping with all of the satellites out there that it might work.
They work fine today, the date and time just won’t be right. The positioning still works fine. I still use this and my Magellan Nav 1000 on a regular basis.
9:30 safety was definitely the cause of turning off SA, but the lack of resistance was because SA really didn't accomplish much. The military justification for SA was to prevent an enemy from using our GPS to guide their precision munitions. But a 300 foot margin of error doesn't really matter for an ICBM.
also they found that software could just compensate. So someone with a receiver on a laptop could just have the program compensate out the SA. like all DRM people eventually figured out a way.
@@filanfyretracker interesting. I had forgotten about this, but I now have some vague recollection of a conversation I had with a surveyor a decade ago. He claimed some crazy level of accuracy (like 1-2 mm) with a GPS that used the encrypted signal to help correct for interference (without decrypting it) plus a local transmitter set up at the site at a precise location (like a monument). And of course there were combination receivers that used GPS + GLONASS even back then. So yeah. Lots of possibilities, and all SA did was make GPS less useful to the average person. Also, SA can still be deployed on a regional basis. In Iraq and Afghanistan SA is still enabled. I am not sure if it actually provided any benefit given all the other options these days, but it was definitely a thing.
What I find even funnier is the altitude and speed restrictions. In some froot-loops mind, some third party is sophisticated enough to develop and manufacture an ICBM while simultaneously being too incompetent to build a GPS receiver without those restrictions. Sounds like something some 75+ year old degenerate in government decided on.
I used one of these to navigate sailing off coast years ago. They came out after Loren nav. went away ( garbage )This was state of the art in its day. Sailing 250 miles it would bring me within feet of the buoy marker that was my waypoint.
Almost right. Maps can come from anywhere and are often stored on a chip. Back in the day, most GPSs came with a chip that contained the maps. And you can download maps ahead of time if you don't have an internet connection. This happens when you are 'way out in the out back' or something. I always think of GPS as an overlay for the maps which are static on your phone or gps receiver. The lanyard is long so you can put it around your neck and put the receiver in your pocket. If you're depending on it you do NOT want to drop or loose it.
I know when my old phone was about to be retired the mapping part of Google maps worked but no traffic information etc. At least it would still get me where I needed to go even when it wasn't on the phone network. I have a probably 10 year old portable car GPS I tried to give my step dad but he and mom could never figure it out so I got it back. Probably should see if it's still usable just for fun.
In 1998 I got a Magellan Colortrak. Very similar to the 2000. It does still work if you have enough time on your hands waiting for it to lock onto the satellites. But the date and time on the screen is incorrect due to the GPS Y2K like roll over problem from a few years ago. These days as a geocacher I use a Garmin Montana 610.
FYI, I got my old, dead Magellen 310 GPS unit working again by doing a hardware reset and manually entering the time and date (I don't remember if the time I entered was UTM or local time), and finally entering my location to initialize. Then I let the unit sit outdoors open to the sky for 20 minutes. It eventually picked up the satellites and got a fix. The week data is still sent as a 10 bit number, but the roll-over is a problem many units can't handle (hence the hardware reset and manually entering the date+time). Unfortunately, many GPS units don't allow the user to manually set date+time. If I remember correctly, Garmin wrote a command line tool to do this reset of the date+time for some of their older units..
I had a Fortuna GPSmartBT back in my GeoCaching days and that, too, ran into a similar problem. On the 11th July 2005, the GPS stopped getting a proper location fix because the week rolled over and the device got wrong ephemeris data from its internal table. So it was looking for satellites that weren't visible in the sky at that moment. Some guy from the eXpansys forums published a patched firmware that had updated tables valid until 2010 - so that was a way of prolonging the device's life back then.
I have a Magellan expolrist 500 color from 2007 it works great as long as your out side it has trouble indoors. I even had a fixed 3D position 8 sats up to 12 at a time. It's been amazing though the years but it's time to get a new one sadly.
“GPS is really pretty simple” He says about a system that literally has to take into account the theory of relativity in order to function correctly. But I understand what he was saying and wanted to leave a breadcrumb for those who like to take a deep dive.
My first encounter with gps was in 2004 with my first phone. A Motorola brick from nextel, they had this menu where it tells you the position but takes forever to get a lock on the older nextels like my I450. The newer ones like the I875 would lock pretty quick. My first official phone with Google maps enabled was in 2008 with a nokia 6275I and my first phone with actual working gps navigation was my samsung messenger 2. Good times, i remembered showing my dad google maps in 2008 when i got my first laptop and printing out instructions for him
I was gona mention looking for programming headers. Would be neat to see it work. I may buy one myself To see if a form of linux or even arduino code could run on it for time and date. Swap a chip out with an arduino just for date and time. I remember those old units. Used to want one when we deer hunted.
@@TechThrowback Yes Mine Too. Love going out on the cherokee Queen. I've watched your other channel watch JR go for years, I just found this one this week.
my garmin gps 4 or 5 did this, i havent booted it up since 2018. it tries and does detect satelites but never gets a fix. ive left it powered up externaly for months. it has full bars and multiple satelites but wont get a fix
I doubt the week counter rollover would affect those simple devices. After all they only need to know what time it is within those 1024 weeks. There is no outside reference to the "actual date". There are also many devices affected by the 1024 week roll over that just ignore it, working perfectly fine. My Thunderbolt GPS disciplined oscillator is a prime example for this. It works fine, just displaying a bogus date.
How many people that you know think their phone talks to satellites? How many call a dish antenna a "satellite?" How many think FM radio is part of the Internet? It goes on and on.
i know some people that say when their phone has no signal they say the phone has zero satellites and conversely when the signal bar is full it has full satellites lol
I'm guessing none. If anything it's the opposite. I know several people who refuse to believe that their phones RECEIVE signals from satellites. They think that navigation is purely part of their cell phone service. One might assume they think that because they have no maps preloaded on their phones and can't use navigation without data connections because of that, or because they saw the option to increase accuracy through nearby WiFi and were confused by that. Nope. They think that because they don't believe satellites are real.
I am confused... I have several old GPS receivers that were not updated to handle the week number rollover and they work fine, they just don't know the correct date.
That's because the guy is wrong. It's just clickbait, The whole point of the rollover is that it DOES still work fine, only the date / time is out. And if you know approximately what the date is, you can even correct for that. If you're using an old GPS receiver to get accurate time, common software like the NTP daemon even knows how to correct it (and has done for years .. plenty of existing time receivers have already suffered rollover).
@@theelmonk Do you know if there is an issue with this specific model that makes it incompatible with GPS today? I am wondering if he is lying or if he just misunderstood the issue.
It absolutely does not work just fine, read the articles about it or any of the comments here about early receivers like this that can’t handle it 🤷🏻♂️
@@TechThrowback what I could find is that *some* receivers stopped working. Like I said, I use several old receivers that simply show the wrong date, but positioning works, and the time of day is also shown correctly. In the video, you are making it sound like all old receivers are broken now.
@@Finder245 No, I don't. It could be that this or another model fails specifically. But it's not something that affects anything running from the previous epoch: many receivers work correctly but are simply 1024 weeks offset. Most, in fact get the date right too as long as it's within 1024 weeks of their own production date as they know it can't be before then.
It's not quite clear to me why the week rollover problem should prevent it from working. The GPS in my car has the week rollover problem but still works fine except for showing the incorrect date and time. The position, speed and altitude are still given accurately. I'm curious now and will look for an old Garmin GPSII I have somewhere to see whether that works or not.
My guess is that maybe this unit thinks the information it is seeing with the date is too incorrect, and therefore refuses to try to connect further. Or possibly that it is running into a system error with the data it can't understand and is crashing before connecting.
@@snoopdogie187 The thing is that the week rollover issue only has to do with displaying the date and time, by converting the internal time code into human readable form. The actual calculations for determining position, velocity and such are done with the internal time code and that has no problem with rollover. The only way I could see it preventing the device from getting a lock is if the rollover caused some unimportant part of the software to crash (the part that displays the date) and that somehow brought down other unrelated code. I have actually never seen an old GPS not working at all because of the rollover problem and this was a surprise to me. I have however seen many old GPS units that display the wrong date but other than that work fine. I suspect that it could just be that some old GPS units just have some part of the hardware go faulty after many years in the same way that any electronic device is susceptible to and it has actually nothing to do with the rollover problem.
I have one of those I purchased in 1996 for $199. I stopped using in in 2003 when I purchased a garmin that had a map in it. Garmin came out updateable firmware which keeps it working past 2019. If you ever take yours apart and figure out how to update the firmware in the Magellan, let me know as I would be interested in updating the firmware in mine as well.
Is the GPS 2000 XL also dead too. I just bought a used one on eBay for $15 but haven't tried it yet. Might have to end up using it for a novelty Zombie display case.
Seen a tomtom fail to update time in 2019 however it did and still locks onto a signal and can navagate but anything time based either doesn't work or shows invalid information
There are still differences between the military and public GPS system. The public system uses only 1.5Ghz, while the military versions use multiple frequencies to avoid jamming.
Methinks your data is out of date. Newer GPS satellites allow civilian access to L2, and now there's even an L5. So that's three frequencies. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals
The older GPS I'm own is a Motorola Traxar (1993) that display correct Time & Date ! Newer GPS like Magellan 310 (1999), Silva multinavigator (2000), Silva Atlas Pro (2003), Panasonic KX-G5700X (1995) display a wrong date. Lastest GPS (Garmin 60csx, Colorado, Etrex) display good informations. All my units get a fix in 2023 !
Knowing the internet, soon we will have someone who took it apart and modded the firmware to make it work and also added Snake and Tetris(tm)
Calling @Janus Cycle lol
Doom
@@tschuuuls486 thought of him
And do it again for dozen of model and couple of make
God, I hope so.
The 2000 was my first GPS , paid a fortune for it $400 it and it chewed thru batteries
Was very handy in the western plains of NSW Australia
I had a friend with a GPS unit that died because of Y2K in the middle of a search and rescue in the Great Sandy Desert in Australia, I think that thats the correct name. Man he was pissed lol
I remember when the first Magellan NAV 1000 units first came out in 1989. They were almost $3,000. In 1994 I got one of the early handheld Garmin GPS units for $200. It was basic by current standards but it was an improvement over LORAN and it helped me get from Oregon to Manzanillo, MX in an old sailboat.
@@nateo200 correct name
same here, I left it on top of a car accidentally and it went byebyes when we drove off
Many other manufacturers issued a software patch to work around the 10bit week rollover problem. I have several TomTom SatNav units (2007-2009 vintage) that are patched for the rollover issue and working fine. Official support is no longer available from TomTom - but so far the enthusiast community has been able to make current Map Updates available. Units still detect and lock onto up to 8 satellites
I used the Garmin version of this for years. Around 2003, I got a serial port adapter for mine, and would plug it into my laptop. I'd then open Microsoft Mappoint, and it'd show my position on the map in REAL TIME. Mind blowing. Also got an Orinoco network card and did some "war driving".
Orinoco Gold card with an external antenna running NetStumbler on your laptop?
@@SharpBalisong Are you Alex, Mike, or Other Paul? Cause it sounds like you were there.
@@PsRohrbaugh No. I just had a similar set up myself inspired by a video. Does "The Broken" and "Kevin Rose" mean anything to you? :) If not, ignore that. I had a Magellan SporTrak Topo, serial cable, Orinoco Gold wireless card, external WiFi antenna, MS Mappoint, and NetStumbler. Had a lot of fun. I also remember using a program called XPort to input serial port data into NetStumbler and Mappoint at the same time.
@@SharpBalisong xport is the only part of this comment that I don't have some sort of memory of. We always did netstumblet while driving, and didn't mess with Mappoint until back home.
One time we found a dentists office with Linksys / Linksys Wi-Fi. Completely unsecured SMB shares. With all sorts of billing information and patient records.
We connected to their printers, and submitted dozens of print jobs (each for hundreds of pages) saying that their Wi-Fi / network were insecure and they needed to hire professionals to do things like set passwords / change default passwords.
That was one of our last nights wardriving, and I always wonder what things were like that next morning.
Getting old is weird. That feels like last year, you know? Nope 2 decades have gone by.
The strap is not a neck strap. It's a shoulder strap so you could sling it across your body and would rest over your hip and easy to grab and check your track at a glance.
Not something you'd want to drop when you're lost.
@@micahhawcroft1994 Keep in mind early GPS handhelds like this were a navigation aid and not intended for absolute navigation since the signals were intentionally limited to a 30m accuracy. If you were trekking wilderness without a paper map back then you were asking for trouble. This isn't to say that having only a 30m error was considered super accurate back then since such distances were well within line of sight
Had a similar one as an EMT back in the 90s. Great when you were in a rural area and had to call in a helicopter ambulance for transport. Used it a couple of times for that...
My friend got one of the prior versions of this, pretty much the first one allowed after GPS was opened to civilian use. When they first came out. He owned a (tiny) sporting goods company, and got it for a decent discount... from the list price of around two grand. I think he paid about $1200 for it. We used it, in conjunction with hand-plotted points on a USGS quadrant map, to navigate the mountains around Death Valley. That was one hell of an expedition, I can tell you... especially with the "built in error" in the system. It worked out pretty damn well, especially since the Magellan sort of "cheated" and gave the correct location to about 10' most of the time. We had a blast playing with that thing, even though we didn't entirely trust it and did our own plotting based on known landmarks and compass headings.
A fun video! I still have my Magellan 2000 (and its leather case). I used it for microlight flying in the late '90s. Its main purpose was to help guide my flight back overhead to the field where I'd left the car and trailer; which it did beautifully. Its value now is purely sentimental!
I have an older version of this (Magellan GPS Pioneer) with a big antenna lumb on top and a very large green reflective LCD display. Still acquires GPS. Also have the original box and VHS tape that was included with instructions. This device had a strange battery compartment 2 B used with 2 AA cells. They made it in a way you would expect the batteries to be paralleled but one actually has to be placed the other way around with the top (+) against the spring. Weird they did that. Beautiful device with graphical interface and looks of a modern satellite phone.
what a blast from the past: I used these in 1995 (I'm an OG). You have no idea what this meant to us planning aerial animal control operations. We used it to plot points then transfer to a map then give it to the helicopter pilot and he used those points to lay the poison bait!
Aerial animal control? What is that like herding birds? 😂
@@JaredConnellPeople use helicopters to herd all types of livestock. There's some pretty cool videos if your search "helicopter mustering"
They're talking about using poison though, I'm assuming against some invasive species
I'm old enough to remember the early days of GPS... I always knew it was just a system that let you determine your location on Earth. It never occurred to me that younger people might assume the maps were sent from the satellite as well! That would be cool but impractical considering the complete broadcast of just the ephemeris data for the satellites takes a full 12 minutes. Most phones actually download that data from the internet as well so they can get a fix faster.
The misconception is not new. When navigation on phones was a new thing, I remember people complaining that it’s “not real GPS” because you needed internet access to download the maps. Some people also think that the satellites can calculate your location if you use a GPS… most people have no idea how the technology they rely on everyday works even at a surface level.
Wait, people really think that the maps come from the satellite?
@@aliceeliot6389 yes
They use cell towers to speed up the start of the location fix.
@@aliceeliot6389 People are so much dumber than I ever thought 20 years ago.
With a UART connection you'd be able to program it and ultimately program the date. Yes, you'd need to take it apart, but it would be cool to see it working again.
What do you think a UART is?
@@Finder245Universal asynchronous receiver/transceiver? *grin*
I actually have a Magellan 4000XL and it still works! It does however suffer from the week rollover problem and currently thinks that it is 2003.
I tried to set mine to 2003 to get it to work, no luck, even after hours trying to get a lock 😢
I just took out my old Magellan 310 and it still could pick up a fix!!! I checked it with my smartphone with a GPS app and the coordinates are very close! The buttons have become really unresponsive after more than two decades. But it functions the same as when I used it before. Of course, it pales in comparison to today's smartphones. It took me about 15 minutes to initialize like before and I had to input my rough location / time. But yeah, it still works for now. Maybe someday, it will face another limitation and stop working.
The 15min is just the max time it takes to download the full gps Almanach, I belive. This was a normal time before AGPS was a thing. I remember a Nokia N95 without an active internet connection used to take almost as long. Old tomtoms weren't better, either lol.
Unresponsive buttons are a common issue with electronics from the time. I restore vintage game consoles as a hobby and fixing that is actually pretty simple.
Take it apart, wipe the contacts with 99.9% IPA. Then add some IPA to the graphite pad (the dark circle) on the rubber membrane, carefully drag it over a piece of paper two or three times and that's about it. Reassemble and it will be responsive again.
Works on game controllers, remote controls, keypads and the like.
Don't need to rub the contacts on paper. That is a myth. It doesn't matter if the carbon contacts are shiny, as long as they have been cleaned with IPA. A couple hundred handheld consoles fixed. The rubber membranes are unobtainium. Don't risk damage.
@@JohnGotts I've done it countless times and it works fine. Only time something ripped was a Mega Drive controller dpad membrane that was so worn that the nipples already had massive tears anyway.
My uncle used one of these a lot back when they were new. He is heavily into shipwreck diving in Lake Superior. Cool to see one again.
How odd... Magellan copied the look and layout of the Garmin GPS 40 that I had significant e-design responsibilities for.
The early GPS development days were exciting. During the development of our first product, the GPS 100, all of the engineers took the prototype outside and waited for our first ever position fix... and waited... because there were only a very few L1 capable birds up - way back then. We had to wait quite a while for at least 3 satellites to become visible, and with good enough DOP... but it finally happened! That was an exciting day, for sure! It was a few months later before there were sufficient L1 satellites to get a full 3D fix (if I remember correctly... that's been a long while back!)
After working on the GPS40/45, I also worked on the electronic design for the early GPS 20 and 25 sensors.
Garmin is an incredible company to work for... they have always really really cared about the people that work there. When I started (#13), it felt very much like a family... and as much as possible for such a huge company, they still do today.
I haven't been there for the entire life of the company, but I'm back there now after a 23 year time away, but I was reinstated with all of my previous years worked - almost like I had never left... full benefits, the same full retirement vesting that I had when I left... HOW MANY PLACES WOULD DO THAT?... unless they care about their people?
I wish I lived near the plant myself, but I am a long time Garmin user.
My GPS 32X works great, and I am planning on adding an external antenna port with iso-tee for an active antenna that can be remote mounted.
Being a 40 year RF engineer helps in modifying receivers.
Things have come a long way in the last 27 years, thanks for the information. 👍
There was this "Y2K Like Bug" scare in 2019 which was supposed to kill off all old GPS devices.
My Tomtom GO and Navman S30 from 2004/5 work perfectly fine.
Likely it depends on the particular firmware, and how robust it was made by the programmer. Smart programmers would have known to use a larger counter. However that introduces some extra complexity into the programming so many programmers would have avoided it assuming the devices simply wouldn't be in use after 10 or 20 years - which is likely true, but not always. The really frustrating ones are the ones that are factory units built into cars. That's why I object so strongly to the "infotainment" being so deeply integrated now, it's yet another thing that lead to planned obsolescence of cars.
My old mapless and my old tomtom just needed an update and work great afer.
Yeah, nothing bad happened because engineers immediately got to work on patching everything before it went south.
Yes the week rollover problem that happens every 19.7 years
This video had me worried that my old toys would just stop working --- even if I haven't touched or used them in, well, probably a decade. I broke out my Garmin etrex Vista C from early 2005. It works great! It took about 10 minutes to find 4 satellites and then popped up. All my old tracks, waypoints, etc are still stored and accessible. I have an older Garmin III I can try, too.
Good thing I'm Irish. My Garmin GPS III+ also works from 1999 --- but claimed memory battery low and that contents were erased, unfortunately! It came up from a cold start in just a few minutes.
Thank you for making this channel, I find anything you show and talk about to be very interesting.
because you have no liife
I knew someone who had a unit *like* that in the early 2000s. Probably not the same model, but it was huge and only gave coordinates. She was *really* into it. When she first came to visit me she asked for the GPS coordinates of my house, for example. Also used it for geoCaching.
I still have a Garmin GPS 45 stopped working in 1999. Got the Garmin III the same day.
Too bad they couldn’t handle dates correctly 😥
@@TechThrowback
*Saw the thumbnail* and I was like what's Robert Lewandowski doing on a tech channel?
It's interesting, I wonder at what point they fixed this in later GPS's to keep them working after these rollovers? I have an old Garmin StreetPilot III from 2001 that's went through the 2019 rollover and it not only still works, but reports the current date accurately.
I have GPS receivers from the very early 2000s that show the wrong date, but otherwise work fine. I think this was always the expectation. It sounds like this specific receiver (and probably many other old ones) has a bug related to handling this issue.
Garmin even released an update for their older devices… Your device seems to be newer..
Your video encouraged me to dig out my old 2000XL (looks the same) to see if it still worked. I set up the initialisation data and it sat outside for probably a couple of hours. It did, however, eventually get a fix!!
The date is wrong, it shows 3rd Oct 2003 when it is actually 19th May 2023, but the time is correct. I suspect this clock issue may have been why it took so long to get a fix as I set the clock "incorrectly" (ie to the current date rather than what the GPS thinks is the date).
So all is not lost. My GPS 2000XL works, just with the wrong date. I'll have to dig out my even older Silva GPS compass and see if it still works.
I found a GPS 2000 (non XL) in my cupboard - didn't remember having that. Must have had some issue with it way back then as it's basically new in box. Anyway, after 3 or 4 hours outside it managed to get a 3D fix! Sensitivity is terrible and it only showed about 5-6 stars on the status display (advertises a 12 channel receiver), but eventually got the 4 satellites required. Most of the time it was in and out of 2D (3 sats) mode.
So summarising, it is pretty much unusable, but it *did* work again. You probably just didn't wait long enough. Cheers.
From the same era, Garmin made the GPS 38 handheld receiver. That one was updatable through the serial interface to fix the EOW bug. Thanks JR for the content!
1995 was when the Thomas Guide and the AM radio traffic reports were your friend.
I borrowed one of those from a friend in the early '2000s to find my first few Geocaches. Got hooked and got my own Garmin etrex legend. I still have a couple of handheld GPS's that I use regularly but my phone is actually my primary GPS now. As cool as those old ones were, you probably would not put up with their performance today.
I still have/use my Garmin 50 from 1992. Still works perfectly. Now, my Ray Jefferson handheld LORAN hasn't worked in several years. Drat.
I still occasionally use my old GPS315 (Magellan) and I was happy to find it still works.
I even use it to map the constellation for setting up current generation module almanacs, mainly to avoid very low azimuth sats.
It beats dragging the laptop outside.
I tried mine and it works for navigation, but it shows the wrong date. It looks like the date froze on a buffer overflow but leaves everything else still working. You can even manually set the moon phase and fishing times screen to the correct date.
Yes, I just noticed the incorrect date, I don't dare change it...
I have faith that the retro technology enthusiasts will be able to come up with something.
Garmin (as an example) released a fix for their old devices. It’s a hazzle to update those over serial, but it’s a great service from garmin..
The hack rf can Mimic gps signal and make a Device think it is wherever you want it to say
One of my first aviation GPS's, was an Apollo Precedus II Morrow Handheld GPS. Similar package as that Magellan, but at the time, was way ahead of its time. Check one of those out, if you can find one cheap enough.
I am sure you only ever used it for "situational awareness". :)
What did you use to keep dipping the plane to follow Earth's curvature without going into outer space?
@@rob8855 you use the attitude indicator and the altimeter for that.
It will run continuously for 24 hours on the AA batteries not to mention that it’s waterproof. Mine still works fine, when you change the batteries it will take about 10 minutes for it to acquire a lock. Mine has a basic topo map with some highways and roads.
I have a Magellan GPS 315 which I used to back in the 1990s for plotting broadcast station monitor Point measurements all across the us. About 10 years ago I powered it up and it did not acquire any satellites. It seems like the format of the satellite data had changed sometime in the last 25 years.
This is incorrect. The week rollover problem is a real thing, but it does not cause vintage GPS navigators to stop working. I have several vintage units, going back to the Magellan NAV 1000, which is the first civilization GPS navigator sold in 1989, and they all work fine.
What *does* happen is the unit will report the wrong date, but the actual positioning works perfectly.
When you use a vintage unit for the first time after the memory is erased due to having no batteries in it, you need to leave it outside for a good hour before it finds a signal, because it's running on the vintage almanac data that tells it which satellites are in the sky, which of course is no good to it. So it has to find satellites manually until it can download a new almanac.
Yeah, I went to an outdoor school. SJSA, if you want some reading. We would devote the last month of school to a canoe trip about that long. A thousand or so KM one way. No real outside support. Mostly wilderness. My first exposure to early GPS was on those trips. One of the teachers would bust out a laminated map and plot where we were at day's end with the help of one of those early civilian units.
Magellan 2000 was our first GPS receiver , still remember that summer on the Cape horn as a child, and my dad telling me to shout him the position on the screen , it was a life saver when fog came in , along the old green display furuno radar , 20 years later we have chartplotters and waze on our cellphones , the Magellan 2000 was a milestone , it put the average Joe in contact with the GPS tech back then , had a NAV5000 too , from the 1st gulf war as a backup on the boat.
There was a data cable and battery eliminator that did just plug-in instead of the batteries as you said earlier but definitely had data in and out available and should be able to program it whether it’s supported or not any more that’s another matter definitely has data in an out in the battery compartment
Definitely me to use it with a paper map. That’s why you do have all the different datum to match with the map Datum
A 2007 Garmin eTtrex Vista HCx started giving an incorrect date and time after the week rollover, but continued getting a (3D) fix and correct coordinates. After a firmware update is still works fine.
You should have bought a Garmin GPS12. I pulled mine out of storage and tried it. It WORKS!!!! It locked on to the satellites and gave a accurate position, elevation, and time. However the date is trash, today is 19 MAY 23 and the GPS12 says 03 OCT 03.
I'd almost bet money that thing has an internal serial connection. Where there's a will, there's a way.
Most GPS receivers from this time period had a cable available from the manufacturer that gave the unit an RS-232 port and NEMA-82/83 data output...you could use that with a program like DeLorme maps and plop your laptop in the right seat of the car for a moving map 😊 Aviation ones had the same output, and built-in GPS receivers in aircraft used the NEMA data for an optional moving map (most of them gave you lat/long on the single line LCD display along with groundspeed, and could navigate you on a flight plan with outputs to a VOR OBS head). Probably in the very late 1990's the receivers started coming with B&W lcd displays (color for the deluxe models) that had a tiny built-in moving map display.
@@brentboswell1294 I bought my first aviation moving map handheld GPS in 1997, the Lowrance Airmap.
This showed up in my recommendations. Started watching it and thought man this guy really looks like WatchJRgo. Took me a minute to realize it actually was you.
Same for me. Lol
I love this channel already! Great idea and video’s JR. Always been a fan!
Ran one of these on a motorbike back in the 90s.. connected to a Compaq Ipac running mapping software. Worked a treat, like Austin Powers.. map with a red dot on it.. No routing but it helps seeing where you are :-) We also used to run PMR radios with homemade headsets for bike to bike comms. It's a lot easier these days!
I keep mine in my gun cabinet to remind me of my earlier hunts. It worked well back then, It was a lot of money back then. Now I have 3 GPS units. I was hoping with all of the satellites out there that it might work.
They work fine today, the date and time just won’t be right. The positioning still works fine. I still use this and my Magellan Nav 1000 on a regular basis.
9:30 safety was definitely the cause of turning off SA, but the lack of resistance was because SA really didn't accomplish much. The military justification for SA was to prevent an enemy from using our GPS to guide their precision munitions. But a 300 foot margin of error doesn't really matter for an ICBM.
also they found that software could just compensate. So someone with a receiver on a laptop could just have the program compensate out the SA. like all DRM people eventually figured out a way.
@@filanfyretracker interesting. I had forgotten about this, but I now have some vague recollection of a conversation I had with a surveyor a decade ago. He claimed some crazy level of accuracy (like 1-2 mm) with a GPS that used the encrypted signal to help correct for interference (without decrypting it) plus a local transmitter set up at the site at a precise location (like a monument).
And of course there were combination receivers that used GPS + GLONASS even back then.
So yeah. Lots of possibilities, and all SA did was make GPS less useful to the average person.
Also, SA can still be deployed on a regional basis. In Iraq and Afghanistan SA is still enabled. I am not sure if it actually provided any benefit given all the other options these days, but it was definitely a thing.
What I find even funnier is the altitude and speed restrictions.
In some froot-loops mind, some third party is sophisticated enough to develop and manufacture an ICBM while simultaneously being too incompetent to build a GPS receiver without those restrictions.
Sounds like something some 75+ year old degenerate in government decided on.
I used one of these to navigate sailing off coast years ago. They came out after Loren nav. went away ( garbage )This was state of the art in its day. Sailing 250 miles it would bring me within feet of the buoy marker that was my waypoint.
Flashing it with manually updated firmware sounds interesting
Almost right. Maps can come from anywhere and are often stored on a chip. Back in the day, most GPSs came with a chip that contained the maps. And you can download maps ahead of time if you don't have an internet connection. This happens when you are 'way out in the out back' or something. I always think of GPS as an overlay for the maps which are static on your phone or gps receiver.
The lanyard is long so you can put it around your neck and put the receiver in your pocket. If you're depending on it you do NOT want to drop or loose it.
I know when my old phone was about to be retired the mapping part of Google maps worked but no traffic information etc. At least it would still get me where I needed to go even when it wasn't on the phone network.
I have a probably 10 year old portable car GPS I tried to give my step dad but he and mom could never figure it out so I got it back. Probably should see if it's still usable just for fun.
Gotta love 90s marketing. X-treme 2000 X-tra!! If only they knew what a letdown the 21st century became.
In 1998 I got a Magellan Colortrak. Very similar to the 2000. It does still work if you have enough time on your hands waiting for it to lock onto the satellites. But the date and time on the screen is incorrect due to the GPS Y2K like roll over problem from a few years ago. These days as a geocacher I use a Garmin Montana 610.
FYI, I got my old, dead Magellen 310 GPS unit working again by doing a hardware reset and manually entering the time and date (I don't remember if the time I entered was UTM or local time), and finally entering my location to initialize. Then I let the unit sit outdoors open to the sky for 20 minutes. It eventually picked up the satellites and got a fix. The week data is still sent as a 10 bit number, but the roll-over is a problem many units can't handle (hence the hardware reset and manually entering the date+time). Unfortunately, many GPS units don't allow the user to manually set date+time. If I remember correctly, Garmin wrote a command line tool to do this reset of the date+time for some of their older units..
I had a Fortuna GPSmartBT back in my GeoCaching days and that, too, ran into a similar problem. On the 11th July 2005, the GPS stopped getting a proper location fix because the week rolled over and the device got wrong ephemeris data from its internal table. So it was looking for satellites that weren't visible in the sky at that moment. Some guy from the eXpansys forums published a patched firmware that had updated tables valid until 2010 - so that was a way of prolonging the device's life back then.
I have a Magellan expolrist 500 color from 2007 it works great as long as your out side it has trouble indoors. I even had a fixed 3D position 8 sats up to 12 at a time. It's been amazing though the years but it's time to get a new one sadly.
If I remember correctly these were handheld users meant for hikers. Not for people to guide themselves in vehicles to get around with.
“GPS is really pretty simple”
He says about a system that literally has to take into account the theory of relativity in order to function correctly.
But I understand what he was saying and wanted to leave a breadcrumb for those who like to take a deep dive.
"Will never work again" is quite the declaration. Quitters never win.
My first encounter with gps was in 2004 with my first phone. A Motorola brick from nextel, they had this menu where it tells you the position but takes forever to get a lock on the older nextels like my I450. The newer ones like the I875 would lock pretty quick. My first official phone with Google maps enabled was in 2008 with a nokia 6275I and my first phone with actual working gps navigation was my samsung messenger 2. Good times, i remembered showing my dad google maps in 2008 when i got my first laptop and printing out instructions for him
$200 from 1995 is like $400 inflation corrected for 2023, not that cheap.
My dad got a Magellan auto gps in the early 2000s, it cost something like 800$.
The deeper you dig into how GPS works, the less simple it will seem
I used one in 1999 to travel the Sahara desert then follow the dots home.
I was gona mention looking for programming headers.
Would be neat to see it work. I may buy one myself
To see if a form of linux or even arduino code could run on it for time and date. Swap a chip out with an arduino just for date and time.
I remember those old units. Used to want one when we deer hunted.
I remember my dad used to have one, came in handy for flying (planes/helicopters he flew didn't have GPS).
Nice box, probably enough room for more modern receiver inside. BTW, what kind of MCU does it use?
I still have one..used it on Grand Lake in Oklahoma.
Hey I've got a place there, it's my favorite lake! 🍻
@@TechThrowback Yes Mine Too. Love going out on the cherokee Queen. I've watched your other channel watch JR go for years, I just found this one this week.
I'll be dipped. JR going full bore on his tech geek side.
There should be 4 pads in the board that you can serial into. 😊
my garmin gps 4 or 5 did this, i havent booted it up since 2018. it tries and does detect satelites but never gets a fix. ive left it powered up externaly for months. it has full bars and multiple satelites but wont get a fix
Those (and similar units) where a staple of early geocaching
I actually Owned one of these (still do) and used it during Search and Rescue Operations.
Best use was aboard Boat finding known Lobster Holes
Hi! You have great content and deserve more subscribers, now you have me. Long life to your channel!
I bought one of these when it first came out and hated it from the start.
Very interesting. Subbed.
I've been wondering what models from the early 2000s will still work.
I doubt the week counter rollover would affect those simple devices. After all they only need to know what time it is within those 1024 weeks. There is no outside reference to the "actual date". There are also many devices affected by the 1024 week roll over that just ignore it, working perfectly fine. My Thunderbolt GPS disciplined oscillator is a prime example for this. It works fine, just displaying a bogus date.
How many people that you know think their phone talks to satellites? How many call a dish antenna a "satellite?" How many think FM radio is part of the Internet? It goes on and on.
i know some people that say when their phone has no signal they say the phone has zero satellites and conversely when the signal bar is full it has full satellites lol
I'm guessing none. If anything it's the opposite. I know several people who refuse to believe that their phones RECEIVE signals from satellites. They think that navigation is purely part of their cell phone service. One might assume they think that because they have no maps preloaded on their phones and can't use navigation without data connections because of that, or because they saw the option to increase accuracy through nearby WiFi and were confused by that.
Nope.
They think that because they don't believe satellites are real.
Why am i just finding this channel?. Its weird seing watch jr go with out hearing on this episode of watch jr
I am confused... I have several old GPS receivers that were not updated to handle the week number rollover and they work fine, they just don't know the correct date.
That's because the guy is wrong. It's just clickbait, The whole point of the rollover is that it DOES still work fine, only the date / time is out. And if you know approximately what the date is, you can even correct for that. If you're using an old GPS receiver to get accurate time, common software like the NTP daemon even knows how to correct it (and has done for years .. plenty of existing time receivers have already suffered rollover).
@@theelmonk Do you know if there is an issue with this specific model that makes it incompatible with GPS today? I am wondering if he is lying or if he just misunderstood the issue.
It absolutely does not work just fine, read the articles about it or any of the comments here about early receivers like this that can’t handle it 🤷🏻♂️
@@TechThrowback what I could find is that *some* receivers stopped working. Like I said, I use several old receivers that simply show the wrong date, but positioning works, and the time of day is also shown correctly. In the video, you are making it sound like all old receivers are broken now.
@@Finder245 No, I don't. It could be that this or another model fails specifically. But it's not something that affects anything running from the previous epoch: many receivers work correctly but are simply 1024 weeks offset. Most, in fact get the date right too as long as it's within 1024 weeks of their own production date as they know it can't be before then.
It's not quite clear to me why the week rollover problem should prevent it from working. The GPS in my car has the week rollover problem but still works fine except for showing the incorrect date and time. The position, speed and altitude are still given accurately. I'm curious now and will look for an old Garmin GPSII I have somewhere to see whether that works or not.
My guess is that maybe this unit thinks the information it is seeing with the date is too incorrect, and therefore refuses to try to connect further. Or possibly that it is running into a system error with the data it can't understand and is crashing before connecting.
@@snoopdogie187 The thing is that the week rollover issue only has to do with displaying the date and time, by converting the internal time code into human readable form. The actual calculations for determining position, velocity and such are done with the internal time code and that has no problem with rollover. The only way I could see it preventing the device from getting a lock is if the rollover caused some unimportant part of the software to crash (the part that displays the date) and that somehow brought down other unrelated code.
I have actually never seen an old GPS not working at all because of the rollover problem and this was a surprise to me. I have however seen many old GPS units that display the wrong date but other than that work fine. I suspect that it could just be that some old GPS units just have some part of the hardware go faulty after many years in the same way that any electronic device is susceptible to and it has actually nothing to do with the rollover problem.
Why did this thing have an optional plug-in power supply? It would allow you to trace your path as far as the power cord length!
I have one of those I purchased in 1996 for $199. I stopped using in in 2003 when I purchased a garmin that had a map in it. Garmin came out updateable firmware which keeps it working past 2019. If you ever take yours apart and figure out how to update the firmware in the Magellan, let me know as I would be interested in updating the firmware in mine as well.
"necklace" = Lanyard
Lanyards shouldn’t be 3ft long, so necklace is true and funny. 🍻
This unit ran into the Y2K bug for real!
Is the GPS 2000 XL also dead too. I just bought a used one on eBay for $15 but haven't tried it yet. Might have to end up using it for a novelty Zombie display case.
For context the number 2000 use to suggest it was futuristic.
I have a etrex Legend from Garmin FW 3.6. Tracking and Time works, but Date stand on Oct. 2003.
Seen a tomtom fail to update time in 2019 however it did and still locks onto a signal and can navagate but anything time based either doesn't work or shows invalid information
I have a few 2000s and 4000s and they work
There are still differences between the military and public GPS system. The public system uses only 1.5Ghz, while the military versions use multiple frequencies to avoid jamming.
Methinks your data is out of date. Newer GPS satellites allow civilian access to L2, and now there's even an L5. So that's three frequencies.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals
@@pontiacg445 methinks your data is star trek
I recall trying this in 2010 - 2011 with a magellan nav 5000 and ended up actually getting a lock
? I have an old Garmin GPS 12 took it out a couple weeks ago and it's still working is it just a Magellan model ?
Sounds like you could you a software defined radio device to send the dates in blocks and update the time slowly
The older GPS I'm own is a Motorola Traxar (1993) that display correct Time & Date ! Newer GPS like Magellan 310 (1999), Silva multinavigator (2000), Silva Atlas Pro (2003), Panasonic KX-G5700X (1995) display a wrong date. Lastest GPS (Garmin 60csx, Colorado, Etrex) display good informations.
All my units get a fix in 2023 !
I had an early Etrex Legend. I thought it was so cool.
Nice video! Thank you. I bet some techie on YT would get this working (with a lot of work). Ben Eater comes to mind.
3:33 my old Garmin 90 would take five minutes to get a lock and always had trouble holding a lock.
Can’t you Calc an offset?
I wonder if my old PLGR will still work
Hey, the UK uses miles too!