Bluetooth VERY short range!

[PDANEWBIE]

Okay I need to know what may be causing my Bluetooth in my PDA to have extremely short range. I know that Bluetooth in the IPAQ is class 1 which is supposed to be appx 30 feet but when I have something more than 3 feet from it it disconnects.

What spawned this? I got my Bluetooth GPS last night and I was so excited to try it out. I got it paired it saw everything and I was HAPPY!

Well here is where my happiness went dowhill. As I lifted the IPAQ up (and left the gps there it disconnected. then with it 3 feet away I tried to connect it and it would not find any device at all. At first I thought it was a defective GPS unit until I plugged in myu USB bluetooth device into my laptop and fired it up with no GPS pairing problems.

Also note that I have had other bluetooth issues with this ipaq in the past when doing large file transfers it would just "drop" the Bluetooth connection within active sync.

In all I can't get bluetooth to even work half way reliably...

Is there any way to go through bluetooth on my ipaq with a fine tooth comb and ensure it has all the correct files and they are communicating correctly?

[Jorgen]

Some incompatibility between different device's BT implementation?
Hardware error?
Interference from other wireless devices (microwave, wi-fi, mobile phones, other wireless phones, other BT devices ...)?

I don't really believe in the last one as I have for years been using all the abovementioned wireless disturbances without problems.

The dropout you mentioned could have been caused by a stack error (not unknown to happen at least in earlier implementations).

Jorgen

[PDANEWBIE]

I think I got it figured out -

I saw that some of the ipaqs have the dropping problems and I found a patch here -

http://www.handango.com/PlatformProductDetail.jsp?siteId=1&jid=B218E6ACE7X824C8EDB2D1C6X6EXC6C6&platformId=2&productType=2&catalog=0&sectionId=0&productId=96903

(Its a free download and has worked like a charm for me)

The other part is I think since the GPS was just plugged in it may not have been keeping a good connection. Now that I applied this patch and have the GPS unit fully charged its working like a dream.