Hi Ian,

I have had similar GPS issues with my N9 as well! Your post is the first one I have managed to found about the same problem.

Usually the phone is not getting any real (A)GPS fix, no matter what. Instead it will only get some rough position with WLAN/Cellular network. This can easily be seen with GPSMeeFo application that doesn't report any satellites found, or Drive application that keeps saying "Looking for GPS signal" forever.

This is definitely some issue with my (and your!) device only, as I have tested so many times getting GPS position with multiple N9 devices on a same place at the same time. Every other N9 devices get GPS fix really fast, but mine keeps always saying that no satellites found.

I have found that sometimes rebooting my device helps for a while (and sometimes not). Furthermore, I did find out that restarting "nped" process (Nokia Positioning Engine Daemon) may help too, but next time while needing GPS, it's probably jammed again. Here is how to restart nped from terminal:

devel-su
/sbin/stop xsession/nped
/sbin/start xsession/nped

Have you checked your syslog (cat /var/log/syslog) after failing attempts to get GPS working properly? Any obvious errors there? For me there is sometimes nothing suspicious, but sometimes there is a flood of the following error messages (tens or even hundreds!!):

nped[1537]: i2c_write: Remote I/O error

I have tried to clear and re-flash my device, but nothing helps. The given I/O errors of I2C bus suggest to me that there could actually be some hardware failure on my N9 causing the problems. Somewhat faulty bus conductors on the mainboard or bad soldering of the GPS chip perhaps could cause this?

I have struggled with this GPS problem since the beginning (N9 launch), so I think it's getting time to take my N9 to service and demand the mainboard to be changed or a whole device.

-Kalle