TomTom Broken Wire

The purists among you are not going to like this!  But it works!!

The problem was that the male plug, the RJ11, attached to the TomTom GPS receiver had, through normal ware and tear, broken wires and therefore didn’t want to speak to the PDA and TomTom and another wee programme I have visualGPSce* (that ones just for fun).

The options were;

To rewire it at the plug.

Difficult to get just plugs they normally come at the end of a bit of bit of cable.  Even if you get one you need a special clamp/pincher thingy to get the cable on.  Nah!

To get a new cable and solder the wires into the GPS receiver.

Have you seen the size of the wiring inside the GPS receiver?  Do jewellers use soldering irons?  Even if they do I didn’t know one to borrow from AND inside the GPS receiver there are 5 wires – best left alone.

Thugs method!

Buy a cable with RJ11s on each end.  I got mine in Radio Shack, 3 meters £3.99, they were cheaper and longer on eBay.  Find out the colour order of the wires within the RJ11 plugs (because you just know TomTom will be different from everyone else – awkward that company or what?) cut the cables then join the wires so that they all speak to each other.  In my case it was TomTom (TT) red to  new blue;  TT brown to white/blue; TT orange to orange (TT must have slipped up there) and TT bare wire to white/orange.

The photo below shows the order of the cables on TomTom with the lug of the RJ11 plug upwards; red to the one at the top of the picture brown the next one down etc..  I don’t know if every other company in the world uses a standard format (except obviously TomTom) but I’ve shown what I found inside my new RJ11 plug in the photo.

I do hope that’s all clear if there are any questions please fire away.

Jack

PS mine does work now!

PPS my cable is now an extra 3 meters long! Its shuge!!!

* Here’s the blurb.  VisualGPSce is a free PocketPC application that displays GPS data graphically as well as record the raw GPS data (NMEA 0813) to a file. Other features include satellite azimuth/elevation, GPS signal quality, analogue gauges and statistical position averaging.  http://www.visualgps.net/VisualGPSce/default.htm Basically some of it looks like the stuff a pilot uses.  Want to know how high you are it will tell you.  I think it’s a bit cool.

Thanks Nero

No-one else has one but I'm pretty sure its a broken wire. 

100% confident at taking it apart (and maybe even getting it back together again so long as I dont get electocuted! So wee things like this I'm happy with, fiddleing about the back of tellies is what I did was I was yonger and didn't know any better - getting blasted across a room sorted that out for me

Thanks again.

Hi Folks

My TomTom GPS receiver is knackered.  It seems to be getting power but my PDA says ‘no signal’.  I’ve already decided it’s a loose/broken wire in the connection between the lead and the car mount (I think its called a RJ11 or 14 connector).

Now I’m assuming its easy enough to get a new connector and that once I trim the wires (2 or 4?) they will be different colours.

Does anyone know where (in Edinburgh hopefully) I could get a DIY connector?

Does anyone know what colour of cable will go where?

Has anyone done this before who assure me it’s the easiest thing in the world to do and even an idiot can do it?

Thanks

Jack