Oh, and when I run the geoclue status command, I do get the cof.d warning, but not the ones about the wifi. Must be because I disabled that, I guess.
There’s no need to edit geoclue.conf or disable any location sources, so please don’t unless you know exactly what you’re doing. Geoclue will use GNSS whenever it’s available and will only fallback to less precise sources if it’s not, so you’re not gaining anything this way.
As expected. Show me a mobile phone that gets a reliable GNSS fix indoors 
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Every android phone I’ve had for the last 10+ years has had no problems with this (and no I’m not talking about with wifi assistance).
I get accuracy within 10ft (most software reports as within 30ft but the reported location is actually within 10) in my home with the android phone. The Librem5 is bounding around between reporting 1 house over and 1 street over (off by 50-500 ft, most of the time closer to being off by 300-500 ft). The longer I leave the librem 5 alone it will go from having a blue circle indicating the low confidence in the location to being confidently wrong about the location and bouncing around at impossible speeds so it should be able to calculate that the confidence must be unwarranted.
There are only a handful of commercial, steel reinforced concrete, buildings I’ve had issues getting a GNSS fix in over the years with multiple brands of android phones. Most residential and high rise buildings have no issue.
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So how many satellites are being used for the solution and with what kind of SNR then?
I have tested many different phones during the last few months and while it’s possible to get an unassisted fix by placing the phone near a window for 10 minutes or so, there’s basically no chance to get a fix in the middle of a regular house I’m living in. Some buildings may make it harder than others, but it’s not even supposed to be reliable without external antenna, especially when you have to download almanac from the sky.
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12-16 satellites, so far with the tools used SNR ranges between 10 and 20 on the android phone I checked just now. If you point me toward a preferred tool I’ll use that one, same for pointing me to how to gather the data on the Librem5 to compare.
And which constellations are that? (it’s impossible to see 16 GPS satellites at once, so you must be using other systems as well)
To make an apples-to-apples comparison on the Librem 5, you’d have to first run the script from Assisted GNSS ($1207) · Snippets · Snippets · GitLab to upload up-to-date almanac and ephemerides to the module and to configure the constellations (we don’t have assistance data for GLONASS available so far; there’s GPS, BeiDou and Galileo; the module doesn’t support GLONASS and BeiDou running at once anyway though), and then watch NMEA GSA and GSV messages via socat.
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Should be at least GPS + GLONASS since that’s been standard for a while. Not quite sure how to check if others are included.
I mean, yes that would be a closer comparison of the hardware, but respectfully. People compare the combination of hardware and software and having to run a script that is in the source repository is not the same as happens in the background. Is there an ETA on this being background functionality for the Librem5?
I’m sorry, what? I don’t understand this. (I can look it up after going through the script process but if you can elaborate to save time that would be a bonus).
Well, things that are WIP tend to require a bit more attention from the user that those that are already integrated. An alternative would be to get outside, ensure perfect conditions and line-of-sight to the satellites, wait for the module to download all almanac and ephemerides from the sky and only then go inside to perform a test.
Or to compare with another phone that doesn’t use online assistance, but then I can already tell you that the result will be “both of them take very long and perform poorly”
As mentioned in the linked instructions: sudo socat unix:///var/run/gnss-share.sock -
When I ran this the command took a moment to complete and there was no returned data so I’m not sure what I would be watching for if I just get returned to the prompt after?
It should start showing a stream of NMEA data coming from the GNSS module. Is your system up-to-date? Is gnss-share running? Are the killswitches set to a position where GNSS module can be enabled?
I’m also realizing it would have been good to ask if there was a way to check if the librem5 already had the content the script downloads. Thus far it appears to have had no impact and the librem5 is still quite confidently wrong by around 500 ft.
If you’re not getting anything from socat, geoclue likely doesn’t get anything either, which means you’re not using GNSS at all.
Yes
Yes
Yes, all 3 are up/on/whatever
Reboot and do socat as the first thing you do without touching any other location related stuff.
Well, that sounds less than ideal.
Rebooted because that seemed like a good next step and now getting a bunch of text from that socat command and the GPS does seem to be much more accurate.
I wonder how many others have had the GPS stop working and not known it since there was nothing to indicate to me that the GPS wasn’t being used…
I don’t know for sure if this was this specific issue, but there’s a reliability fix for gnss-share coming in the next update that may prevent this from happening. That said, it’s more likely that it was an effect of you running the script which now uploaded almanac/ephemerides to the module, so when you got things back to normal after a reboot it was able to get a fix quickly (the module stores this data on its internal flash so it persists).
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The point is that if GNSS is not working, or the user suspects that it’s not working, this behaviour can mask the problem and confound attempts to diagnose.
Location via WiFi is a privacy problem in my opinion and should be “off” by default in the Librem 5.
One factor that you have to eliminate is caching of the location i.e. you get a fix as you enter the building and even if no fix can be obtained inside the building, it can report the last known fix. Unless your house is particularly large, such a fix won’t be too far off correct.
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I second that remark on the lack of privacy when the wifi location is enabled.
And switching it off did also result in my L5 not obstinately placing me in a location I had never visited in my life. Based on my IP-address it kept ‘thinking’ I was located at some office or hub associated with my internet providers provider.
Besides, why would I need wifi navigation anyway?! I only use the navigation in places where there is no wifi. Wifi navigation is about as useful as a mobile with an extension cord.
There is a legitimate reason - because location services is not exclusively used for navigation. When I take a picture, the JPEG metadata is typically tagged with the location. If I am inside when I take the picture and unable to get a fix via GNSS but I can get a location to a precision of “one house” using WiFi then the picture will be adequately tagged for most purposes.
To an extent, WiFi navigation would work e.g. in an area where WiFi leaks out of people’s houses for many houses and that area was densely mapped by Snoople (and under the assumption that for some reason GNSS is unavailable); in other words in more urban areas.
Note that using the IP address for an estimate of the location is worse than using WiFi in most cases, from the perspective of accuracy. On a mobile device on a mobile network using the IP address is very dubious.
I assume it also helps getting the fix faster.