Interesting but discouraging!

An interesting but discouraging thing happened today- and it cost me some money – like down the drain! Ok, I bought a cable ($23.99) to connect my IBM Thinkpad 23 to my GPS. Then I bought MS Streets & Trips 2003 ($39.99 less $20 rebate). I was excited as I hooked everything up the other night. We went out for a little drive and sure enough it tracked where we were going – abeit, a little slow due to a licenceing agreement by MS to only update the map position every 15 seconds.

Three days pass and I try my other GPS (a Lowrance Airmap 300 used for aviation): I spent a lot of time making a special cable to connect the Lowrance to my computer. Driving down the road it keeps track of my position like a champ. However, I am having a problem with the GPS reporting lost position alarms popping up and then going away. By the time I get home I am steamed and decide to sell the Lowrance on eBay.

Fast forward to today! Guess what? I want to test out the non-aviation handheld GPS I decided to keep. So I hook up the $23.99 cable and fire up the computer with the $19.99 Streets & Trips software. Man, nothing is working correctly so I remove the more or less permanent install to find out what is going wrong. (do you have any ideas yet?) So, I drive around and not even a peep of a signal is hitting any of the 12 satellites it is supposed to track. So I just disconnect everything and turn on the GPS – bam, 6 solid hits on the meter. I hook everything back up and the signals disappear. To make the short story long – It is the IBM T23 causing the problem – too much radiated interference from the processor or power supply.