Sony DSC-HX5V

For my next holidays I bought a new camera (since the previous one died last year) and I wanted a quite cheap camera (I suck at taking pictures) with a GPS in order to have the coordinates of the shots easily.

I decided to buy a Sony DSC-HX5V which is well rated for its pictures quality.

This post is about the GPS receiver inside the camera. If you are like me, you don't like/want to install extra software for things like a camera. Usually camera makers provide poor softwares and they are quite always not compatible with plenty of things. So I didn't installed the software provided with the camera.

I tried using the camera a bit and I noticed that acquiring GPS signal was painfully slow, which is quite normal for a GPS when it's not assisted in any kind of way to know its position or the satellites positions (while a smartphone usually can know its approximate position from the cell tower it's connected to and/or can download satellites positions from a website).

After looking a bit in the camera menu and looking on the internet, it's possible to add a file with satellites positions for the next 30 days in the memory card and the camera use it to help locating itself.

From nearly 2 minutes to find it's position it dropped to less than 20 seconds, which is now acceptable.

The software provided by Sony does that (writing the satellites position on the memory card) at least the Windows version. On Mac OS it doesn't seem to work and of course, there is no version of this software running on Linux.

The manual way to do that is to:

• download the file from Sony's website: http://control.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/GPS/assistme.dat
• optionally check the file is not corrupted with the associated md5 found here: http://control.d-imaging.sony.co.jp/GPS/assistme.md5
• write the assistme.dat file to the memory card (not the internal camera memory) in the folder Private/SONY/GPS/ (you may have to create it)
• check that the assist data are valid in the settings menu of the camera

This procedure is from Henrik Brix Andersen's blog. Check it to find a perl script he did to automate that. One guy provided a simple application to do that automatically each time you plug your camera on Mac OS: https://code.google.com/p/gpsassist-update/.