I use a 3DR LEA-6 GPS receiver on my 3DR Hex. It's connected to an APM2.5 running 3.0.1 firmware
I always use telemetry and normally, I see 10 to 14 satellites. If it's less, I usually wait a bit in order to acquire more before taking off. When I'm in the house tuning things or setting waypoints, I normally get a fix of 5-7 satellites depending on which part of the house I'm in.
For the last week or so, I've only been getting 5-7 satellites outdoors and no satellites at all indoors.
I recently switched over to a Taranis TX with the FrSky X8R receiver and thought perhaps the new receiver was causing the problem.
Today I disconnected the Taranis receiver to see if it would make a difference. I also disconnected my 915Mhz telemetry radio so that only the APM and GPS were powered.
Today it's worse.... Now it won't lock on any satellites. The flashing blue light never comes on and MP shows zero sats. I tried it indoors and outdoors with no luck. I even swapped the GPS to APM connector cable with a spare I had, but the GPS still won't lock on any sats... Just to make sure there was no local interference affecting things, I fired up my Magellan hand held GPS unit and placed it beside my Hex.. The Magellan works normally and sees satellites.
Could something in the APM be causing this, or is it time for a new GPS? If so, is this a common failure, or am I one in a million :)
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Today I have the same problem ona quad that was working last week. No crashes or physical damage to vehicle cables or hardware. Gps just had red led. Blue led never flashes even after 10 minutes.
I never did get the bad one fixed. It just died in its sleep never to work again.. I don't know if they can be repaired economically with all those micro surface mount components. I never looked in to it.
The new one with the built in magnetometer that I ordered as a replacement worked great out of the box. I guess it's just 'one of those things'.
That's an interesting one!
-Is there any physical damage to the GPS unit (broken antenna connector, etc)?
-Is the GPS getting the full 5V power from the APM?
Depending on your soldering skills, you could attach a second connector to the GPS and hook it up to a USB<->Serial cable to your PC. Then use the uBlox software to take a look at the GPS.