topic Re: Mark IV GPS? in EOS DSLR & Mirrorless Cameras

EOS 5D Mark IV GPS Bug?

Davoud — Sat, 20 May 2023 14:44:30 GMT

As some of you may know, there is a software fault in the 6D that causes the GPS to remain on when the camera is powered down, causing rapid battery drain. Yes, the GPS can be turned off via the menus, but that shouldn't be necessary. Do you happen to know whether the 5D Mark IV has this same bug, or if the GPS turns of with the camera? Thanks!

Re: Mark IV GPS?

TTMartin — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 20:59:49 GMT

@Davoud wrote:
As some of you may know, there is a software fault in the 6D that causes the GPS to remain on when the camera is powered down, causing rapid battery drain. Yes, the GPS can be turned off via the menus, but that shouldn't be necessary. Do you happen to know whether the 5D Mark IV has this same bug, or if the GPS turns of with the camera? Thanks!

I don't consider it a software fault. It takes time for a GPS to acquire its position. If someone wants the camera to have accurate position information from the moment it is turned on they don't have to leave the camera on all the time.

The 6D and 7D Mk II both have that same feature.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

diverhank — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 21:13:16 GMT

Not sure if Canon had made the change to give us the option to have the GPS off when the camera is off.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

Davoud — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 21:29:28 GMT

@TTMartin wrote:
@Davoud wrote:
As some of you may know, there is a software fault in the 6D that causes the GPS to remain on when the camera is powered down, causing rapid battery drain. Yes, the GPS can be turned off via the menus, but that shouldn't be necessary. Do you happen to know whether the 5D Mark IV has this same bug, or if the GPS turns of with the camera? Thanks!
I don't consider it a software fault. It takes time for a GPS to acquire its position. If someone wants the camera to have accurate position information from the moment it is turned on they don't have to leave the camera on all the time.

The 6D and 7D Mk II both have that same feature.

OK, you say to-mah-to, I say to-may-to.

In any event, I now have the Mk IV manual and there are two modes. Mode I has the same fault, er, I mean "feature" that the 6D has. In Mode II the GPS shuts off when the camera is turned off (but not when the camera powers off automatically).

It requires about two minutes, on average, for my 6D to get a GPS lock. I don't use the 6D GPS because of the "feature" to which I referred. For both the 6D and my 5D III I use Lightroom Maps to assign geographc coordinates, or, sometimes, I make a photo with my iPhone to record the location where a photo was made. As for the Mk IV, I'll just wait and see how the GPS performs. I have GPS devices in which signal acquisition is, for practical purposes, immediate—meaning it requires a few seconds.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

diverhank — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 21:46:58 GMT

I have the 7DII and I keep forgetting to turn the GPS on and off - very annoying, indeed. At least, the 5D4 has improved on that. What we need now are firmware updates for the 6D and 7D

Re: Mark IV GPS?

Davoud — Thu, 08 Sep 2016 23:06:10 GMT

@diverhank wrote:
I have the 7DII and I keep forgetting to turn the GPS on and off - very annoying, indeed. At least, the 5D4 has improved on that. What we need now are firmware updates for the 6D and 7D

Bingo. Exactly so. IMO, that is.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

Waddizzle — Sun, 11 Sep 2016 12:51:24 GMT

@diverhank wrote:
I have the 7DII and I keep forgetting to turn the GPS on and off - very annoying, indeed. At least, the 5D4 has improved on that. What we need now are firmware updates for the 6D and 7D

Usually, I am in one general area when shooting. so I will take a test shot with the GPS turned on [and then turn it off for the rest of the shoot]. I can use the GPS coordinates in that test shot as data to add to the rest of the shots.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

TTMartin — Fri, 09 Sep 2016 12:33:50 GMT

@diverhank wrote:
I have the 7DII and I keep forgetting to turn the GPS on and off - very annoying, indeed. At least, the 5D4 has improved on that. What we need now are firmware updates for the 6D and 7D

The 5D Mk VI way of doing it is definitely superior.

I agree it would be nice for that enhancement to be added to the 6D and 7D Mk II.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

alanrclarke — Fri, 23 Sep 2016 20:02:41 GMT

It's not a fault - it's a bit of very bad user interface design and missing functionality.

I complained repeatedly to Canon about the 6D, but to no effect.

Now they have implemented it correctly in the 5D iv. There are 3 options:

Off
Off when camera is switched off (and GPS takes ~60 seconds to reacquire signal)
On all the time, and drain your battery in 3 days or less!

The 6D does NOT have the same functionality - if it's on, battery drains in 3 days period. No option 2

Re: Mark IV GPS?

mplaforest — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 15:30:19 GMT

Got a new 5d Mark IV just over a month ago. Took the camera to Vermont and decided to use the GPS function. I made sure the GPS was in full-time GPS mode. The GPS geolcation was way off. I was standing on top of a mountain with no tree or other objects to block a signal. GPS icon was show connection and when I checked the picture the geo location had me standing in a swap 50 miles way in New York. I live in Texas and have been doing to different locatoins around town standing in the middle of soccer, baseball and football fields to see if the GPS can find my location. No luck. Geo location has me in another town. The best position I've been able to acheive is 30 from the actual location. I've contact Canon and so far the answer is "look at page 388 of the user guide". I have a friend with a Mark IV and he is having the same issues with his GPS. I'm wonder if anyone is getting accurate GPS results from with their Mark IV? I've tried the different settings to get good GPS results and yet nothing. I don't want to send the camera to Cannon, because I'm fairly certain they'll tell me there's nothing wrong with the camera and then I'll be charge $$$ for shipping and other costs to troubleshoot the issue.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

kvbarkley — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 16:00:41 GMT

Where are you seeing the picture?

Have you tried loading the actual long and lat into google maps to see if it is correct?

Re: Mark IV GPS?

TCampbell — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 14:49:39 GMT

I've never had any issues with mine... but when I saw your post I pulled out my phone and put it next to my 5D IV to compare... they both agree on the geo-location (to within a few tenths of a second).

The GPS will take a few minutes to get an initial position fix. If you check it too soon after powering up then it may not have a good fix yet. The solution is to just wait a few minutes (it'll typically have a pretty good fix after just 3 or 4 minutes). However the position fix you initial get (right after it's able to get that first fix) will continue to get more accurate over time.

Something else to know about the GPS network... a GPS receiver calculates the your position by determine the fractional time offset for the signals it is receiving from each of the GPS satellites it is currently using. It has a list of known satellites and their orbits and uses that data to determine where the satellite would have been located when it transited the signal... and uses that to work out where YOU must be located in relation to all the satellites it's using.

But here's the rub... the satellites don't maintain consistent orbits. They'd drift. This means the satellite may not have been located in the spot where the receiver thinks they were and this can cause a fairly strong level of inaccuracy ... especially if it's been a while since you've used the GPS.

The organization that controls the GPS network works out the drift and updates the orbit data. The satellites themselves periodically then transmit their new orbit data so that all GPS receivers can update their internal data. But this takes a while.

If you have a GPS that hasn't been used in a while... or you've moved subsantially since the last time you powered it up (not a few miles... but hundreds of miles or even thousands of miles) then it will take the GPS longer to get it's first position fix.

Basically it has to listen to the network for those orbit updates that come from each satellite and once it's received enough new orbit data from enough satellites then the position fix will get better and better (you'll also find the startup time significantly improves before it gets the first fix because it internally stores those updates and it'll be powering up in roughly the same location with very recent data which means the initial data that it receives will be able to worked out to a reasonable solution much faster.

I have a sailboat with a GPS. I keep a second hand-held GPS onboard so that if the main GPS ever fails or loses power (and that actually did happen to me personally once... and it happened to a friend of mine (different boat, different GPS) on another occasion)... then you can find yourself in the middle of a massive body of water and you can't see land in any direction. You've been relying exclusively on this thing for your location and now it's dead. So you need a backup. I test the backup GPS from time to time but only about once per year. I don't keep the batteries in the backup GPS (don't want them to leak and corrode the contacts). That means when I power it up... it's "as if" it's never been used before (it has no stored updates of any satellites). That system has to start from scratch. It's EASILY a 20 minute (maybe even closer to 30) before it starts getting accurate position data. (I also keep paper charts on the board so I can find the locations of harbors).

Anyway... I never understood (a) why it took so long to get a fix and (b) why the fixes were always initially very poor... but got better with time... until I learned about the satellite drift and orbital data updates.

Also, you can set the update rate to preserve battery. I want to say the default rate is 15 seconds... but you can set it to as infrequent as once every 5 minutes. If you're primarily working in the same location then once every 5 minutes is great because you're not going anywhere. But if you're constantly on the move (driving etc.) then in 5 minutes you can be miles away from the last position update.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

mikemacc — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 17:06:04 GMT

Tim -- Thanks for this descripition and explanation but it seems there is something else going on with my Mark IV. My camera's GPS consistently makes the same error, which is off by about 20 miles to the south and east.

I've checked this over the last several days by leaving the camera outdoors in a space open to the sky for various lengths of time. The GPS is in Mode 2, meaning it goes off with the camer's power switch. I've tried position update intervals of 1 minute and also 15 seconds. Initially, acquiring the signal took several minutes, as you described, but is subsequently very fast.

After the GPS signal is acquired and then another 30 to 60 minutes I read the Latitude & Longitude off the cameras GPS Information display and compare that to the Lat & Long displayed by Google maps. This is how I determined the ~ 20 mile error.

An error of this magnitude renders the GPS useless. But is there something I'm missing? Can you think of a reason the camera would consistently be wrong that is not hardware/software related?

Re: Mark IV GPS?

kvbarkley — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 17:20:52 GMT

Only if someone is spoofing your GPS.

(Are you in Nevada?)

https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2018/february/01/pilots-alerted-to-gps-jamming-exercises-in-southwest

It sounds like a camera problem ot me.

What software are you using to read the GPS data? could it be rounding off?

Re: Mark IV GPS?

mikemacc — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 18:28:30 GMT

GPS spoofing is interesting. Would the error be consistent and over several days if that were the case? I'm in Vermont and have not noticed a remotely similar error in other GPS devices.

I'm taking the latitude and longtude strings directly from the camera and plugging them into Google maps, a procedure that has worked well for me in the past.

Thanks for the suggestions. - MIke

Re: Mark IV GPS?

TTMartin — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 20:34:07 GMT

Are you using the latest firmware?
Version 1.1.2 and not 1.0.2?

https://www.usa.canon.com/internet/portal/us/home/support/details/cameras/dslr/eos-5d-mark-iv?subtab=downloads-firmware

Re: Mark IV GPS?

diverhank — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 21:05:46 GMT

The only thing I can think of is you could have entered the strings into Google in the wrong format. Your 20 miles off sounds very much like the difference between minutes versus decimal of a degree. I'd double check and make sure I choose the right format for Google entry.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

mikemacc — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 21:10:47 GMT

Firmware is one of the first things I checked. It was 1.04 and I've since updated to the latest, 1.1.2.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

mikemacc — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 21:55:10 GMT

diverhank -- This was the answer!

I was entering the string in decimal format without converting to decimal. But when entered in the same format as the camera reports (https://support.google.com/maps/answer/18539?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en), such as 42°17'48.7"N 53° 32'31.4"W the location is shown correctly.

I learned something and am very appreciative. Thank you very much.

Re: Mark IV GPS?

ksl11 — Sat, 20 May 2023 01:15:29 GMT

Hi,

I have the exact same issue you described. The GPS is reading 20 to 100 miles off. It does not function as advertised.