Initializing a GPS For Dummies (Techwalla Week 1)

Typical GPS initialization screen

Congratulations to the folks at Demand Media on their recent name change to Leaf Group (9 November, 2016), although we admit it makes us sad to see their DMS¹ brand going away. It is gone, though, but a lot of their crappy content remains. Their latest trick is to start parceling out all of their eHow junk into newly-created "niche" sites; so this week we'll feature legacy content that has been moved to a place they call Techwalla.com². Without further ado, let's get to one of those; a little piece of content by Techwallan (née eHowian) Kallie Johnson (aka Carrie Catalano) entitled, "Magellan GPS Won't Initialize."³ Presumably, the article should have been a how-to for troubleshooting a Magellan GPS, but Johnson had a problem.

Kallie's Bachelor of Arts in English apparently did not include a whole lot of instruction, if any at all, in how to use a GPS receiver; and, for that matter, probably didn't include anything more technical than how to turn on your Macintosh Airbook® when you get out of bed in the morning. That, we suspect, is why Kallie's understanding of the meaning of "initialization" of a GPS is that "the screen lights up," as one might infer from her introduction:

"If a GPS unit won't initialize, or power on, troubleshooting the unit can help you determine the cause of the problem. Common problems include dead or uncharged batteries, defective power cords, or a short or problem in the unit. " Well, no, Kallie, initialization of a GPS is  more than merely powering on -- it includes the all-important step of finding enough of the satellites that it can locate itself in space. There are several reasons that an older GPS might have problems with initialization, some of which include:

• The most common reason is that a receiver is indoors or another location where the sky is blocked by buildings or the terrain. A GPS needs line-of-sight access to orbiting satellites to initialize.
• The unit's satellite location database (almanac) may be out of date and need to be refreshed.
• The unit may have out-of-date firmware that requires a re-flash

The solution to such problems is not, in the vast majority of cases, Kallie's six-step procedure that boils down to "make sure the batteries are charged and turn it on." (as an aside, eHowian Melissa King published an almost identical article on another Leaf niche site, Our Everyday Life -- we see another series...)

This is precisely the kind of mindless rubbish that made eHow the laughingstock of the internet and forced Google to release their Panda update. Moving Johnson's useless information to a niche site with a stupid name doesn't change the fact that it's sill useless. Leaf Group, Ltd., Kallie's your first official Dumbass of the Day -- but she won't be the last.

¹ DMS is (was) Demand Media Studios: you can't spell "dumbass" without "DMS"
² No idea what a "techwalla" is supposed to be, but we suspect the word has some connection to the cultural illiterates who think the French word voila is pronounced "wallah!" -- and we aren't surprised DMS, errr, Leaf employs at least one of them.
³ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   techwalla.com/articles/magellan-gps-wont-initialize

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