You're kidding right?

I've spent the last fifteen years or so extolling the virtues of GPS. Every time someone has told me that signals disappear, or that some mad two-star General in a bunker in Idaho can turn the system off, I've told the preaching Luddite that he was just plain wrong. I've lost count of the amount of times I've explained that a proper panel-mounted GPD just doesn't lose signal.

About a minute after leaving the strip I reached over to dial up Boscombe Down's frequency. Right there on the screen, in big green letters, was a message - NO GPS POSITION - the message light was flashing and that confirmed the lack of a signal. Mr Garmin (a GNS530W) was lost in space. The satellites may have been talking but for whatever reason the 530 wasn't listening.

For a few seconds I just couldn't believe it - this kind of stuff just doesn't happen, and yet despite turning it off and on again, always a good cure for electrical ills, nothing changed.

I was on a short VFR flight in the local area and with visibility at least 50k the danger of getting lost was minimal, and of course I had my Garmin aera sitting on the yoke merrily picking up signals. Had I been on an IFR flight the loss of the 530 would have been a major pain.

I'm hoping that the problem is as simple as a lose aerial connection or similar - I want my 530 back.

Update: order has been restored in my GPS world. As hoped, there was a problem with the antenna connection, and once that was fixed everything came back to life. I'm going to have to re-visit my evangelical enthusiasm for GPS, or at least tone it down a little…