I drove my sister to the Car Rental Depot, where she was picking up a rental. Out in front was a little special-purpose parking lot, with the sign, “GPS Sync Area – Ten Minute Parking Only.”
GPS Sync? Like…huh? What does that even mean?
It’s clearly for this
That makes sense in a self-evident kind of way… Um… What are those things? I’m no less befogged than before! Why would they need a special parking area?
In the words once uttered by a great and wise man… Huh?
I would imagine it’s somewhere where people can wait for their GPS units to acquire a signal. They can take a minute or so to start working, so someone in a completely unfamiliar area (as people often are when renting cars) might not want to get onto the road until they have some idea where they’re going. 10 minutes is pretty generous, but I guess a single digit would sound pretty stingy.
I googled it and the only references to such a waiting area are about San Diego, so it’s not a widespread thing.
My suspicion is that it’s for letting the GPS boot up and find the satellites. My portable unit can take a few minutes to become fully functional after turning it on.
Imagine you fly into San Diego with your GPS turned off in your luggage. You get to the car rental garage, pick up your rental and turn on your GPS. But since you’re indoors (in the garage), the GPS can’t establish a connection to the satellites. It needs a clear line of sight to the sky to do that. Is the GPS sync lot outdoors? If so, then my guess above makes sense.
Or what they said.
I imagine they had some people blocking access while they waited, so they decided to allocate an out of the way place for it.
Was there anyone parked there? I’m surprised people still rent those units when everyone has a smartphone already.
What Dewey Finn said. If you’ve travelled hundreds of milles with your GPS turned off it can take a lot longer than normal for it to establish its location. I picture the poor device going, “Wait a minute, where am I? I knew should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”
And to Reply, they don’t need it for the local units, but for the ones people bring from hime.
Yeah, this would totally work for cell phone map applications too. I’ve experienced this minor inconvenience myself, where the rental (or regular) lot is under a lot of concrete. This strikes me as a pretty thoughtful thing, and would have solved a problem I’ve actually had.
I rented a car in Germany once that had a built-in navigation system (First time I ever used one, in fact). I needed a few minutes to figure out how to use it; first trick was finding a way to change the setting from German to English. Then I could search by city, find particular sites within that city, etc.
It’s probably not as bad as that now, since so many people will have some experience using them, but (if a rental car comes with one) some people may still want a minute or two to understand how to use that particular system.
If a person is running that close on time, they should have taken an earlier flight IMO.
What do you mean, running that close on time? No matter how tight or loose your schedule, you’ll still need a few minutes for your GPS to start up, and you’ll still need some place to be while that’s happening.
Running my Garmin Nuvi alongside my phone has shown I can trust the Garmin more than Google maps.
Also, when I went to Europe last year, I made sure that there was a GPS rental to go with my car. This alleviated any issue with phone/service compatibility in a foreign country. FTR, I had service but it was throttled back to 3G speeds.
Your data speed shouldn’t have a significant impact on the functioning of your phone’s GPS.
The first time you turn on a GPS receiver, it may take ten to fifteen minutes for it to receive signals from enough satellites to determine its location. Turning on a previously used receiver will have it look for the current constellation pattern of GPS satellites, based on the current time at the last known location. But if you’re now across the country, the constellation (almanac of locations) will be wrong and the entire GPS has to be resynched. The complete identifier takes 750 seconds (12 1/2 minutes) to broadcast, which lets the receiver know which satellites it’s listening to. See the Wikipedia article for all the gruesome details.
I’d think it’d also be a good place to enter an address of a hotel or location where you’re travelling to and let the route be calculated. I’ve done the “drive a rental car in a strange city entering an address while trying to leave the airport” fiasco; usually the first thing I do is find a parking lot before I crash.
Interesting that it might be only a local thing. That’s odd. But, yeah, your explanation makes sense.
(I sometimes use Google Trails when hiking, and it can take a minute for the GPS to zero in on my starting location. Much less of a deal when one is afoot!)
There were other cars parked there…it’s a very small space, good for about six cars. No one was in those cars! People were clearly using it as ordinary access parking. (Um…I used the space for that myself, to let my sister out. Guilty, guilty, guilty.)
What do you mean? It’s a place for people to wait to get going. If they’re running that close on time they’ll fumble with it while they’re driving.
If a person is i9n such a hurry that waiting for the GPS to find itself will make them late, \Then I agree with myself that they should have taken an earlier flight so that is not a problem.
What is of concern to me is smart people running all over the world and not know this boot delay about GPS units.
I was hearing a lot of people asking why the GPS needed that time and were impatient about it.
You did not understand what I was saying… Whoop
The OP did not seem to know why anyone would need to wait.
Could I have possibly be making a comment on people who run so tight that 10 minutes on the end of a international or cross the whole county flight have this problem on a regular basis? Think they might just take an earlier flight? ::: sheesh ::::
It’s nothing to do with being impatient, it’s about safe and efficient egress from the rental car departure area.
Giving people some where to be where they can get a good signal, and get the destination and Route sorted out , without blocking or slowing others or driving whilst trying to type in a destination.
I wish IAH had this .
.