gdavis

My 2004 530i (pro nav) has been having lots of problems locating the car accurately lately. It used to be nearly perfect with the 'arrow's' ability to stay exactly on a road where the car was located, but since the idrive software was updated a few months ago (maybe a coincidence and not software related?), it is doing strange things.

Some examples are when I start the car in the morning, the arrow cursor will take 5-10 minutes to get onto the road and in the mean time, the arrow goes off into blocks of houses, buildings, and all over the place where there is no road (completely lost, but nearby the place where I am driving). It also continues to recalculate the route if I have set the Nav to a destination. It eventually locks onto the correct location, but then on tight highway ramps it will go onto the wrong lane and jump around from road to road. It seems to be having problems with its accuracy and can't stay in the correct location much of the time.

Occasionally the arrow also cannot stay with the correct North orientation and it goes around in circles sometimes (dizzying!).

Does anyone know why this might be happening? Or how the system works that might lead to understanding what to fix on it?

The dealer checked out the Nav system and could not find anything that would give them a clue for its problem.

Any help would be appreciated!

MacSid

I had similar issues on my E39 once in the past, and it went away when I got myself newer navi CD's (they were CD's back then )

Possibly related, my E60 had 2005-02 the 2005-02 DVD in it and, after a progman update (to 25, about a year ago), all my real time traffic info disappeared. Got myself the 2007-01 DVD and everything returned to normal.

Not sure this will 100% resolve your issue, but it may be worth a shot.

gdavis

The Nav disc is new, and the same disc didn't cause problems with it wandering in the past. So I don't think it's the disc causing it.

I wonder if anyone has seen problems with the antenna loosing signal strength for the GPS.... is that possible?

Is there some kind of additional data input on from the forward drive motion of the car that also provides input when the GPS looses signal in tunnels, etc that could contradict the GPS data or confuse it?

gdavis

The dealer recommended trying a new disc too, so I'll give that a go this weekend. I wonder if the laser on the DVD NAV player ever goes bad????????? anyone ever seen that one before?

gdavis

Is anyone familiar with what inputs beyond the GPS location data are used by NAV to calculate the position of the vehicle? What keeps NAV going on the correct course when going through a tunnel? Is it possible that the 'extra- non-GPS' inputs could screw up the calculations in some way?