Just imagine the situation where you are in a city that you don’t know, or you are in a foreign country. At the same time, you are not able to speak the local language. There are no many options for you while you are on a quest to find the location of your choosing. This is a situation where you have only one proper one. You can use the GPS on your android smartphone and find the location through google maps. This is the most effective thing you can do, right? Yeah, it is. In some cases, we can see that the GPS is not as accurate as it should be, so it can lead to unwanted results. Don’t panic, there is something you can do about it. There are things to improve your GPS accuracy and they are not so hard to do. Surely, the majority of people are going to use Google Maps since this is the most popular app of them all, and it is the most accurate one when it comes to locations.
Furthermore, there is one thing that you can actually do, you can turn on the high-accuracy mode on your phone. Thankfully, there are a lot of options for you in order to improve the accuracy of your phone. Since the situation about improving the GPS would become much complicated if we talk about the iPhone, we are going to stick to android smartphones. There is one major thing that you can in order to check the accuracy of your GPS. You can use virtuallocation.com and set your location in an area that you know really well and see what the result would be. Anyway, since this is a situation that requires a lot of different things discussed, we are going to talk about the ways you can actually improve the accuracy of your GPS on an android smartphone.
Check Your Current Location
In order for our GPS to work properly, it needs a pretty clear situation. So, the best way to use it is to be outside where you can receive the signal in a proper and efficient way. This can be seen the best when you are using Google Maps. That way you can find the location you are in the best possible way. Sometimes, it can happen that the app is not sure about the exact location, therefore, it will provide you with a radius that surrounds the blue point. The blue point shows the last location where you were located. All the radius that surrounds it means that you are now in the area around the point itself.
The High Accuracy Mode
Maybe you weren’t aware but there actually quite a few things that you can do in order to increase the quality of the location on your GPS. One of the most obvious ones that you can do is to turn on the high accuracy mode. You should be aware that this mode is turning all of the apps that can be used for the improvement of location, like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, etc. At the same time, it can use a battery saving setting that can actually help the GPS with your last known location. It sounds strange, but it is true. According to Zip Code Base, probably the easiest thing you can do in order to find the proper location is to insert the address in the search box.
The Calibration of the Compass
In some situations, even if GPS knows the location, it can make a mistake of pointing you to the false direction. Thankfully, this is not something that will require a lot of time to fix. You only need to download an app called GPS status in order to fix it. After the download process is complete, you can start it and check if there are any satellites you can pick up the signal from. In case there is nothing going on, you should think about the possibility of something blocking the signal. Thankfully, you can use this app to calibrate your location much better. This means that you will be able to see where you actually are.
Refresh the GPS
As you have probably witnessed at some moment during your lifetime, you will see that, sometimes, these tricks just don’t work properly. Don’t panic, there is still one last resort you can address. This one is called GPS refresh. You can use the app we’ve mentioned, GPS status in order to refresh the GPS. This is not a hard thing to do. Before you actually refresh them, you should click on diagnose sensors. After that, you should check out the GPS sensor. After you’ve clicked on it, you will receive the option to reset the GPS.
Possible Blockage
We’ve mentioned the situation where all of these tips simply fail. Now you are entitled to the last possible thing that you could determine if you are going to reach your location of interest the easy way. This means that you need to check if there is something that prevents you to receive the signal from satellites. This situation is called a satellite blockage. It means that you are not able to receive the signal from the satellites. There is a wide array of reasons this can happen. It’s up to you to see what is the ultimate reason that prevents you from receiving the signal. Probably the commonest reason this happens is that you are located under some kind of metallic blockage. Remember, in order to receive the signal, the proper way, you need to be out in the open, without something above your head.
The Bottom Line
Certainly, you’ve encountered a situation where your GPS is not working properly. You should know that there is a variety of reasons why this happens. However, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything about it. In fact, there is. Here, we have provided you with 5 ways you can improve the GPS activity on your android smartphone. We are hoping that our tips will provide you the necessary help in these situations.