I have read here a couple of people who had problems with their Nav system going blank, and then rebooting back up, while they were driving.

I had this happen only once to me, and that was a few months ago. It was on a local road I rarely travel.

Well, on Saturday, I was on that same road, and in just about the exact same spot, my Nav system went blank, and it then rebooted.

I have no idea what could cause such a thing. And that it has only happen twice to me, and both in the same physical place, has gotten me reallying wondering.

 

You might want to clean and check your disk. It actually makes sense it would be in the same place. If the system in that location needs to load a new section of map from a different file and there is a defect on that exact file....

 

I wasn't navigating at all. It was just on the radio display.

 

Did you have the NAV disk in anyway? I personally suspect the thing navigates all the time if the disk is in. What makes me think that? First you'll note there is a direction display at the bottom of the screen at all times if the NAV cd is in in any mode, but if its not, the direction display is gone so its part of the GPS function, not a separate compass function. Second... if you leave the CD in all the time you eliminate most of the problems people report of finding the thing is WAY off on their location when starting out for a long time before it "recovers". I think thats because with the NAV cd in its actually navigating all the time and just not displaying the results on the screen....so it doesn't have to have that first "fix" that takes a great deal of time... in fact if you leave the CD in all the time you find that hitting the MAP function almost instantaneously puts up the map with your location on it... with no time for an initial "fix". This is an old unit so the initial fix is pretty slow.

So... even if you didn't have it in NAV mode, but the CD was in it could be loading a section of the map in the background, and crash on a dirty disk.

 

There is one stretch of road in a residential area where my NAV system reboots every single time. It has to have happened 25 times by now. It has happened in other areas as well, but not with that consistent level of regularity.

Unsuccessful repair efforts to date:

1) new head unit
2) new set of NAV CD's.
3) New power supply

Ford is currently at a loss to resolve this.

Anyone else been through this?

 

Yes, the Nav system is always working in the background, even if you have just the radio on, and even if you have the unit "off" showing just black, or just the clock. It is always running, so long as you have a disc in. -John

 

My factory NAV did the same thing. The probelm stopped when I replaced the Factory NAV with an Eclipse 5510........

~John

 

Hi Walt -


It might not have had anything to do with what you were doing or a read error on the data disks. It quite possibly could have been your location, or to further explain, what you might have been near that caused the re-boot.

This has happened to me many times but mostly in the same locations each time - but not every time - which would rule out a disk problem. It seems that every morning on my way to work, and sometimes on my return, at the exact same spot (on a bridge going over some railroad tracks) I don't get a full reboot but the display goes off (sometimes just all pixels) then it comes back up. I almost always have the FE screen up - it flashes the start-up ‘HYBRID’ screen then goes back to the FE screen. If I happened to be on the NAV screen it will come back up to the standard radio screen.
The other place it happens each time I pass it the same thing happens - don't know what the culprit might be except maybe a Ham Radio etc. close by.

The only thing I can think that is causing this is possibly an RF signal from a relay unit or something near or below the bridge that is interfering with the CPU. At first I thought that it might be that I had hit a bump or something and I had a loose connection. It has happened so many times in approximately the same place, even in different lanes, that the connection theory doesn’t jive.

Hope this helps,

 

Or it could still be the disk... when you reach that location the system ends up reading a new file on the CD for the next portion of the map... that file is corrupted or has some dust on it and bang she crashes... and it will crash in a similar place every time.

 

My had the same issue only all the time constantly, but I fixed it by
-removing the disk
-turnung the car off then on
the the Nav system asked me to update new software have know Idea where if got it from
-I click yes it updated rebotted
It has worked fine since.