Holux GPSport 245 unveiled

The downside of having waterproof pockets is that if water comes in them, it stays in. So it happened on one of my last mountain trips. What was even worse was that the pockets weren't empty but had my cell phone and the little Holux GPSport 245. At the end of the trip, after a full day of ice cold rain and apparently opened pockets, my little gizmos were drowned in water.

The phone entered hydrophilic coma and died a few days after. On the other side, GPSport was still up and running but wet on the inside display. I tried drying it out on a radiator but it didn't work, the amount of  water inside it was to much so i decided to open it.

Holux GPSport 245 and the tool of dissection

 If you have the right tool, opening it is very straight forward: unscrew the 5 fixing screws on the back of the device with a torx head screwdriver then carefully remove the front cover from the rest. Getting the water out was fairly easy with a hot air gun but since getting it dry was only half the reason i opened it in the first place i took a closer look at it.

Front cover removed

Front cover, main and antenna PCB, battery

The inside construction is pretty carefully designed. Water rubber seal keeps the two halves watertight. The only way water could have came in it was through the USB port flap wish is the only communication between outside and inside. The main PCB is good quality stuff but sadly i couldn't get a peek at the "brain" of this little beast as all the processing horses seemed to be under a metallic screen. The GPS antenna is on a different PCB mounted just above the display and perpendicular to it.

GPS antenna

 When i removed the PCB from the back cover i founded a common cell phone Li-ion battery. That's very handy in case I'll ever have problems with it because it will be easy to replace.

Job done! Put all the pieces back together, screwed the screws and  it's as good as new. I use GPSport 245 as a bike computer, a photo GPS tagger, trip logger and sometimes on the mountain as a compass and orientation device. It's small, easy and pretty reliable. It doesn't have all the fancy features of bigger, more expensive GPS navigation systems like big or color display and map support but it's great just the way it is.