I did some reading and found on another forum that many others have experienced the same issue. They however, were able to reinstall an older sync version and get the GPS to start working again. I have tried numerous sync releases with newer and older maps and have not been successful in getting the GPS to show signal.
I have also tried placing an aftermarket antenna on the unit with the same result of no signal. It is as if the vehicle doesn’t know where to look for satellites, or to get the antenna data…
F150Chief is out of town. I think he is back sometime in Nov. I am leaning towards a bad APIM now since you have tried multiple GPS antenna. I have seen where people did get it working with previous versions also, but they did not have to try as many as you have.
Curious why 4DTech would supply an EU version APIM for sale in the US. I would downgrade the unit to 3.3.19052 and see if the GPS works. This is not a MY20+ APIM, so this should be safe to do.
@F150Chief I have tried downgrading as I read in previous post that it will usually resolve the problem, but it didn’t in my case. I will try again and see if maybe I messed something up. I tried a format with the version 4Dtech used when they sent it to me, and that didn’t work either. How are you able to tell that this is an EU unit other then seeing the made in Czech. 4D said they would reload the APIM but will charge $200. I know it is something small I am missing.
The part number is an EU model (-GDE). It has 64GB of memory vs 32GB for the US model. There is supposedly no difference between any of the APIM models, but issues like this arise. I would go thru the test above first to determine if the issue is hardware or software first.
@F150Chief , I will see what I can do… I am leaning toward software as everything was 100% functional before trying to upgrade. I also bought the alternative GPS antenna off amazon that was discussed in other posts and still no capture of satellites. It is like the unit is trying to acquire European satellites even though I have verified USA in the APIM in forescan…
FYI - GPS is an international system, no difference in the satellites worldwide. Sat radio is a whole different matter and uses a separate antenna. If you are using the Ford sharkfin antennas, there are 2 antennas in those, one for GPS and another for sat radio. GPS is fed to the APIM, sat radio is fed to the ACM. The APIM powers the GPS antenna.