Chosen Solution
Are there any ways to fix the gps on the LG G5? Where is the antenna located? I’ve found several fixes and tried a couple. Getting better contact with some of the pins has helped but its temporary. I only get one satellite to connect currently which is better than the none I had before. Help?!
There are lots of posts and videos online telling you to tweak various contacts, but they’re all wrong! I’ve finally fixed this after months of messing.
- The GPS antenna is at the top-right, looking from the front of the phone.
- The contact pad is a tiny piece of metal gauze at the very top right of the back.
- There is only one contact on the main board that contacts this pad (easy to see which it is). I think the reason people say other things have worked is that simply opening and re-assembling the phone will re-seat the contact, improving performance for a while. Real problem: the contact gauze connects to the antenna at the top, the contact pin presses on it near its bottom edge. There should be a tiny rubber pad under the lower part of the gauze. This was missing on mine, so the spring contact never made good pressure on the gauze, and over time wore the gauze away. I only discovered this after buying a broken G5 on eBay and comparing. I swapped phone backs to get it working. I also proved this is the contact by re-assembling with a sliver of paper on the gauze to prevent contact - no GPS signal. The missing rubber pad must have been a manufacturing error, I don’t know if it affected a whole batch. Check out this area in the back of your phone, you may be able to see why there’s a problem. Update (09/14/2017) After more messing, it seems I was still slightly wrong myself! The diagram belo shows where the antennae are on the back of the G5. This is viewed from the back, where the GPS antenna is area 4. Looking from the front (i.e. looking at the back from the inside) it’s at the top right.
Here’s a photo of this area from the inside of the G5 back. There are two contacts in this area, circled in green and red.
I originally thought the antenna was the green one, as it’s in the right location, and disrupting it seemed to stop GPS. However, further tests on another phone have proved to me that the main antenna contact is the red one, which connects to a rectangular pad on the motherboard. The pad is circled in red in this photo:
I suspect the green contact is a ground connection, as are other similar contacts around the back. Bad grounding can be expected to degrade the antenna efficiency, so the ground contacts are important too. I think this is what I was seeing initially. So my conclusion is that good GPS reception depends on both a good ground connection in the corner, and a good connection to the antenna pad marked in red. About the only thing you can do to improve the pad’s contact is to gently rub both surfaces to remove any oxidation. The tip of a spudger is probably the best tool. But also remember that just opening and re-assembling the phone re-seats the contacts, which usually improves things anyway, at least in the short term. This makes it very hard to work out if anything you did inside the phone was actually relevant to the GPS!
Finally I have solved the conundrum of the LG G5’s GPS performance, and it turns out to be down to a mighty screw-up by LG. Messing with the contacts is a side-show, here is what’s really going on, and the ultimate fix. I’ve been poking around this phone on and off for quite some time, and never been happy with the GPS behaviour, even after getting the best possible contact of that pesky spring to the pad in the back. Even with apparently reasonable signal strength (using the GPS Status app), the GPS fix data was still erratic. The position, speed, and particularly direction, would jump about. I noticed this especially when using the phone on my boat - it’s a useful pocket navigation aid with the Navionics app which in particular shows a direction vector on the chart. On water your direction is the most important thing to know, and the vector would uselessly swing around all over the place. I never had that on any other phone. It all suggested the GPS signal reaching the receiver was very noisy, rather than nice and clean. The clue came when I experimented running the phone with the back off. It takes a bit of ingenuity to keep the battery in place, but operating like this the GPS worked perfectly, getting a quick and solid lock. On close inspection I discovered that there is a GPS antenna in the FRONT of the phone. It’s in the top right corner, sandwiched behind the screen. You can’t get it out because the front panel is a welded assembly, but it’s where that flexible track coming from under the motherboard leads to. This was obviously LG’s original design, and at first sight a good idea, keeping the GPS antenna away from the other radio bits. GPS is by far the weakest radio signal the phone has to deal with and any interference will cause problems. However, it turns out that if you bring a metal plate (i.e. the phone back) to within a few millimetres of that front antenna (i.e. you assemble the phone), it kills the output of the antenna stone dead. My guess is that LG only discovered this at a late stage of development, something of an “oh sht” moment! So the quick fix was to add a GPS antenna area etched into the back, with a contact pad in the corner, and a spring contact stuck onto the flexible track leading to the front antenna. It kinda works, but there are now two antennae, and any radio engineer will tell you that connecting two antennae together to one feed will not boost the signal. Instead they will interfere like !&&, creating echoes, distortion, and a noisy, degraded signal - exactly what the GPS behaviour suggests. Solution? Well we now know the front antenna doesn’t do anything useful, so let’s disconnect it to prevent it degrading the signal from the back. All it takes is a sharp knife. Just take the tip of a sharp craft knife, and cut through the flexible track leading from the corner spring contact round to the hidden front antenna, see photo:
I’ve done this on two phones, and they both now have the same clean GPS performance you expect from any modern smartphone. Quick lock, accurate and responsive data, and a rock-solid direction vector. I can get location accuracy down to 10m indoors, I’d never even get a lock indoors before. People make design mistakes, it’s human, but when you do it’s a good idea to fix the mistake properly. Adding a new antenna and not disconnecting the redundant one is more like adding a second mistake than fixing the first one. Thanks LG! If you’re still not happy with the GPS performance on your G5, take the knife to it - enjoy!
First of all, thanks Rick for putting us on the right track. Now, I’ve had this problem on my device, and so I opened it and tested, seems that your first solution (the mesh) IS the correct one. The other (flexible) connector on the PCB (the one that you updated to be it), is possibly not related to GPS. Just to make some order, they BOTH connect to case metal (ground) which is very strange as I can not think why or how would it be used as an antenna. But!, powering the phone while opened, testing several pins which connects to the back, only 1 was found to be the pin for the GPS receiver. This was tested with a thin wire connected and watching the reception on GPS test app. Tested several times, each time yielded same result. Only the connector that mates with the mesh on the case (top right of back case when looking at it while phone opened) gave almost instant lock and strong reception. I’m including photos with remarks to make it hopefully clear:
Here you see the mesh in the top right, the other (green) connects to the flexible connector on PCB, possibly not related to GPS.
I used a piece of thin copper tape folded a few times and glued on one side to the earphone connector.
here you can see the actual pin (red) that connects to the mesh. It is not on the PCB itself, but connects later to underside of PCB (I guess LG decided not to stretch the PCB to the very edge, because it would have to be very thin and fragile, just a guess)
You can see the connector after I removed the PCB, again marked in red, it continues to the pad marked in orange, which I put again a folded piece of copper. This pad connects to the underside of PCB.
The underside of the PCB with the connector that mates with the pad.
Hi Schlomsi, thanks for looking at this in detail, and validating most of what I found. In retrospect, I agree that my suggestion of the second contact relating to GPS is probably wrong. I had tried insulating this contact and failed to get a GPS lock, but I’ve re-tried it and this time it made no difference. It just shows how hard it is to reliably diagnose the problem! If you test continuity of the various contacts areas on the case with a simple multimeter, they do mostly appear to connect to ground - but that’s just a DC measurement. At RF they will behave completely differently. I’m no expert on how these flat on-case antennae work, but they are likely cleverly etched tracks forming a pattern that matches the signal wavelength. If you look at a UHF TV antenna, it’s usually a closed loop. I was interested when you said you’d tested the phone with the back off. I’d wanted to do that, but thought “how do you hold the battery in, and what about the power button?”. So I revisited it, and found that a bit of sticky tape will keep the battery holder in place, and plugging in a charge cable will make the phone boot. Excellent! The SIM holder also goes in fine. To my surprise I got a better GPS signal with the case off than I ever do with it on, and without even touching the antenna contact. It obviously picks up the signal perfectly well directly on the PCB tracks. I then found that just touching the corner contact increased the signal further, confirming that this is indeed the GPS antenna. There was nothing else I could touch that affected the signal. I like your idea of copper foil. I don’t have any so I’ve ordered some, and will see what I can do when it arrives. My GPS signal has once again been slowly degrading, I think that mesh oxidises over time.
This is print screens of Chinese forum translated by google chrome translator. I can’t copy paste link , the system recognizing it like spam.
Ok, after a lot of frustration, I got it working again ( I gaev up 3 times and a year has elapsed) I gave up on this $@$!& phone and switched to a Google Pixel, but my mom broke her phone so I decided to try once more and fix the $@$!& G5 for her to use as a back up. Many thanks to Shlomsi - his post was on point. See images below for referee: I had previously put more mesh/foil at locations 1 and 2, and the GPS improved but it was not fully “functional”. Locations 1 and 2 are what people talk about — but as Shlomsi pointed out there is a Location 3. Once I unscrewed and pried up the PCB and stuck some foil/mesh tape I was back in action! Thanks again Shlomsi !
This may be useful - it shows along-side two different versions of the back cover of the G5 (H850). I noticed the differences whilst troubleshooting GPS problems. Swapping the backs between two phones fixed the issue in this case. There look to have been some design changes during production for these phones. You seem to be able to buy new OEM backs on a popular online auction site, but I ended up getting a reliable fix by buying a used one for a little under £4 (approx USD $5). This photo (click to enlarge - otherwise it’s difficult to see the detail I’m talking about) shows the phone screen and motherboard at the top, the replacement (working GPS) back next to it (centre of the photo), and finally the original (non-working-GPS) back at the bottom (sitting on top of and partly covering the working one).
The design differences in the working back (centre of photo) are: The square gauze to the left has been moved to the right of the photo, and sits partly directly on the aluminium phone back, and partly on a rubber pad (I tried making this mod on the old phone, but it wasn’t successful - that’s why the old gauze looks a bit battered and you can see some adhesive residue where I used double-sided tape to fix down a rubber pad).The brown/grey conductive pad (on the new back - in the centre of the photo) seems to come up a bit higher, and completely replaces the tiny PCB with the pad on which the old back has. The surface-mount component on that tiny PCB is probably a capacitor, because I can’t get a resistance measurement across it. The four vias (square pattern) that you can see on the tiny PCB measures zero-ohm to the metal of the case. On the new back the the brown/grey pad is zero-ohm to the metal of the case. Just in this thread, you can see three different designs for the contact at the edge of the case, so this must have caused LG plenty of grief!
Hey there, First up - thank you for this guide! So I followed it, placing some copper tape over the small GPS contact and now my number of visible satellites has more than doubled (from ±13 to 28+ each time). But I still can’t get a GPS lock. Any thoughts as to why that could be? Cheers Adam.
Specially thanks Rick.
I’m posting this just to thank you a thousand times for the tutorial. Today I opened my G5 because it was completely unable to get GPS signal from any satellite, just to find that the pin that touches de mesh had fallen apart from the mainboard and was stuck to the mesh. I removed it, and carefully folded a piece of aluminium foil and put it in the original location of the broken pin. The result: more GPS signal than ever! Hope the fix will last.
I had the exact same painful problem described by many here — no GPS signal at all or gradually worsening and disappearing signal. I went through the suggested fixes in every single post (including the insane suggestion that said to cut the antenna ribbon, which killed the antenna entirely and cost me a new display) and none worked except the one suggested by Tim Small. The problem is not with the contacts. It’s with the back cover. The only fix is to buy a new back cover and replace it. Then, the GPS is restored to full performance. Don’t waste your time playing with the antenna contacts, the conducting mesh in the back cover, inserting aluminum or copper foils, or such. That’s not where the problem is. Now, the theory: LG G5 GPS antenna has two parts. They are in the top right corner of the phone viewed from the front. One part is inside the LCD display frame and it doesn’t go bad. The part that goes bad is the second part, which is inside the back cover and it’s made of intricate RF strips inside the back cover. These RF strips go bad over time and you lose the GPS reception as a result. The only solution is to replace the back cover with a brand-new one. I bought one that was fully assembled, which cost only a little more than a bare one. Important note: Before you replace the back cover with a new one, operate the phone without the back cover and check if the GPS works using the GPS Status app. To do that, remove the back cover and hold the battery in place with a rubber band. Then, short the contacts for the on/off button (fingerprint reader) with a piece of aluminum foil to turn the phone on. GPS should work without the back cover. If it doesn’t work when the back cover is installed, there is a small chance that the contact in the top left corner of the motherboard (top right corner of the phone when viewed from the front) is bent. Otherwise, the only fix is to replace the back cover with a brand new one. Again, don’t waste your time playing with the contacts, the conducting mesh, aluminum or copper foils, etc. The RF strips in the back cover are delicate and once they go bad, you can’t fix them by overlaying aluminum or copper foils, replacing the contacts, and so on. The attached image is for the new back cover I installed, with the GPS contact being in the top left corner in the picture. Bought on the Internet, it’s removed from a brand-new LG G5 RS988 (unlocked US version). There is also a rubber pad surrounding the GPS contact. They didn’t use a conducting mesh in this version but only a conducting foil.
Update (07/30/2020) Update: The GPS on my LG G5 stopped working again a couple of months ago. If you read my posts, my solution was to get a brand-new back cover. I think my previous conclusion that the problem arises because the antenna inside the back cover gets corroded over time (about 18 to 24 months after purchase) is correct. I don’t think it has anything to do with the contacts. I opened it, and the contacts were fine. I tried an aluminum foil, and it still didn’t work. Then, a month later, the phone completely died overnight while it was plugged in to its OEM charger and cable. It didn’t power on at all. I am guessing the power chip failed. Any data in it not backed up has been lost. It was a good phone while it worked and I had good times with it, but it was by far the most unreliable phone I’ve ever owned. So many things broke in it. Luckily I was able to fix most of them because it was easy to work on. After some contemplation I’ve replaced it with a Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra 5G, and I really like it! It was a great purchase decision!
had a phone from(h860n 2sim version) 06/2016 after 6-8 months screen ghosting after then gps issuses appeared ghosting annoying but not major for me so give the phone for rma, no problem for 6 months gps after again so i opened google and phone inside what fkn problem i saw dirt ,humidity problem greenish spots in the back case that locations clean them add some aluminum foil there voila no problem for until now, So today,i open the inside phone again, clean the those 3 locations from appeared dirt,moisture green dots again now fixed (open area—15-20 sat locked in 20 sec) i dont know how gonna long this time :) My solution for this clean the 3 locations up ther phone back cover inside when ever gonna fail…(for me 3-6months period) (gps status from window)
When GPS vanished I tried cleaning the copper mesh in the backcover, didn’t help. I used a backcover from a broken phone, this having a metal contact plate instead of the copper mesh. Didn’t help. I cleaned the contact plate and GPS reappeared. Then I applied some conducting silver (I took out a droplet of the silver sediment from the tube) to the contact plate and closed the phone immediately, hoping it would kind of “cold solder” the PCB contact to its counterpart in the back cover, making it a permanent fix. We will see how permanent this is. Funny to mention that when I tested, GPS worked without the backcover (battery held in place with a rubber band), though only with weak signals, but not with the backcover on.
In the United States in 2018, people affected by LG hardware issues including G5, filed a class action lawsuit against LG for smartphone manufacturing defects including the G5; LG has been forced to pay back the phones .. are there any volunteers to do the same thing for Europe? read this article there are others: https://labo.fnac.com/actualite/lg-contr…
Update. When I broke my display again I used the opportunity and drilled a hole in the backcover, allowing me to attatch different antennas to the gps antenna connector. That brought no good results, but it ruined the backcover. So I used the old backcover again, but this time I took the PCB off as well and applied conducting silver to the point where the PCB touches the contact bridge in the display part, and after refitting the PCB I applied conducting silver to the point where the contact bridge touches the wire mesh in the backcover. Gps has been wonderful since then. So I dont think that the gps antenna in the backcover degrades, I guess that just the two contact points leading the signal from the antenna to the PCB are corroding.
hi so ive tried alot of suggestions from this blog but not getting permanent results nor gps is stable nor quick. ive used aluminum foil to place under gapped contacts. can anyone confirm whether aluminum foil is good or bad choice for this. i have taken some pictures n will post them.
Mr. Obvious says: wouldn’t it be professional, helpful - and good PR - if someone from (long-disbanded) LG G5 design team and/or tech support weighed in with an official solution, or even an insider’s unofficial kluge? Try to find someone on LinkedIn, twitter, Facebook? Perhaps an experienced 3rd-party tech? (Backup/wipe/restore seems a pretty risky experiment, never mind screwing around with internals.)
Bonjour, merci à tous pour toutes les informations données. Le gps ne fonctionnait pas avant les modifications effectuées. J’ai utilisé de l’aluminium plié en petit carré, un sur la zone du dos où l’antenne rectangulaire est sensée appuyer et l’autre directement sur la grille métallique (sans colle en prenant soin qu’il ne bouge pas lors du réassemblage du G5). J’ai une précision entre 4m et 15m et le G5 capte autour de 20 signaux. Merci encore à tous
