I thought I had solved the disappearing GPS issue through the following actions:
1. Found a setting in the
laptop power scheme (advanced setting) where I was able to completely disable "usb selective suspend"
2. As stated elsewhere, I reinstalled my AT&T option usb GPS driver
3. For the
Garmin GPS connected thru a Prolific
serial adapter, I installed the latest driver recommended by an earlier post (dated July 2010)
I then ran
Opencpn for more than 3 hours with each GPS and had no issue. That was at the anchorage, I just left the laptop alone with the active GPS connection
Today, however, we were sailing all day and the test results were different. The GPS input was shared with
AIS. All worked perfectly for 4:30 hours before I
lost the GPS input. I didn't notice the loss until I started playing with imported tracks, deleting and importing several different ones.
I strongly suspect that the GPS disappearance was related to my playing with GPXin. Restarting OpenCPN didn't solve the problem, I had to reboot the laptop. Trying to reproduce the issue, I brought back my tracks and deleted them for a few minutes and then, while still connected to the GPS, the laptop crashed! After restart, I imported one track, did not delete it or play around, and all worked fine again until we dropped the
anchor over an hour later.