Today I got a bit of free time (a rare occurrence these days) to work on my car and get some bits fitted.

Those of you with various Peugeot cars will no doubt have noticed that your sat nav rarely works or is inaccurate when navigating, you may wrongly believe your sat nav is at fault like I originally did but after trying various others and having similar issues I started searching online. It turns out that Peugeot use a metallic film on the windscreens of some of their vehicles, this is to help keep your car cooler on hot days and stop it turning into an oven. This unfortunately seems to almost completely block out the GPS signal to any sat nav, and also my tracking device.

To resolve this issue, I purchased a GPS Repeater which was relatively inexpensive from Amazon which was quick and simple to fit and works wonders, as you may notice from my glowing review on the product page. When installing this, it should be noted that the external antenna part should be mounted as far away as possible from the internal part, with a large car such as the Peugeot this was easy to achieve.

I started by mounting the external antenna to the rear of the car on the roof. I initially wanted to mount it in the centre of the roof near the radio aerial to get the best possible reception but I ran into issues where closing the boot door would trap and damage the cable so in the end I decided to mount it on the right sight, right next to the roof rail mount and then ran the cable about 3 inches along the gutter and down through the rubber grommet where the rear door cables enter the interior, this keeps it all water tight so you won’t get rain water running down into the car. From here, you can then pull the pillar covers off they are just held on with metal clips and run the cable all the way to the front of the car tucked up inside the roof space. Pulling the pillars off to do this enables you to slightly pull down the roof liner and makes it easier to tuck the cable up there. I then routed the cable towards the interior light unit at the front and using the double sided sticky pads included with the repeater I found the most convenient place to mount the repeater was between the temperature sensor (the part with the slots on it) and the reading light and then tucked the wires up into the roof space again. To access this part and run the wires where I did, you will need to remove the main interior light from the fitting and unscrew the two torx screws that hold the whole unit to the ceiling. The rest is pretty simple, your GPS aerial cable coming from the back of the car screws together to the connector of the repeater that you have just mounted at the front, and the USB cable can be routed to a convenient location for power which for me, was down inside the front right pillar to my Anker 5 Port Charger on top of the dash next to the wing mirror, the power cable for my GPS booster was exactly the right length for this arrangement but you may need to purchase an extension if your power source is further away.

There we have it! The GPS repeater is now installed and functional and I can confirm with a TomTom, my Sony Xperia Z2 phone, and Samsung Note 10 tablet that all are now picking up a strong GPS signal when in the car. You can download this app from the Google Play store to test this for yourself if you have an Android phone. The figure you are interested in within that app is “Fix/Sats” and as long as the number is over 6 when you’re parked in an open space then you’re good to go.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, I will try to update this post with some pictures if I get a moment another time 🙂