My wife's 1450LMT just starts freaking out around Flagstaff, AZ. She says the map starts spinning around, it shows her on roads she is not on and about every 5 seconds it tells her it is recalculating. I don't know if this has happened anywhere else or not, but it happens in Flagstaff every time she goes through there. Any ideas on what causes this or how to fix it? I just downloaded updates about 2 months ago before she headed out to Arizona. As far as I know there were never any issues in Georgia.
Well if it's happening only around Flagstaff it could be due to loss of satellite reception because of obstacles (buildings, tunnels etc) or interference (e.g. from radar at a nearby airport, strong radio signals etc). GPS units are basically very complex radio receivers.
Yeah, that's what I thought at first also, but it happens out on I-40 where there is nothing to interfere with the signal. I asked her if it had happened anywhere else and she said that it had happened to her in New York City, which is not much of a surprise with all the skyscrapers and what not, but that it had also happened in other areas where there was nothing around to cause interference. She was on her way to Salt Lake City and once she got away from Flagstaff it straightened out and worked fine the rest of the way. Kinda hard to trust a GPS that just freaks out like that whenever it wants. You never know if its giving you correct info or not. I've never been a big fan of using them blindly on trips anyway. I'd rather look at a map and Google Earth ahead of time and plan my trip in advance and then just use the GPS as a backup if needed, which still would not have helped her in this instance if she'd actually needed it.
Unfortunately there is no way to tell, from your posts, what is going on. Aside from interference, an intermittently faulty unit (hardware), some firmware issue or some map issue could be the cause.
Now I have a 1490T which is effectively a 1450 with more features and I've never seen this issue in my 2.5 years of owning it. I haven't traveled as far as your wife but I have used it on a number of 1,000 mile multi-day trips.
Now I also pre-plan trips and don't blindly rely on GPS. It is a guide IMO. In fact I sometimes ignore navigation advice from my units. That said many seem to think that a $200 consumer product is (and should be) infallible. It isn't and never will be.
