Lowrance HDS 12 Gen 2.... No GPS,,,,Help Needed

I have a HDS 12 Gen 2 and have had it for a couple of years now with no issues. Randomly over the weekend when i put it on the boat, it started saying No GPS and the GPS never came back on. The Sonar, depth, water temp etc all work fine but not the GPS.

Has anyone had any issues similar to this and have any recommendations? Called Lowrance but since its older than 2 years, not covered by warranty.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

If you like the Settings on the unit, I advise to save Settings to a SD card. After any of the following, Settings can be imported and settings will be the same as before, i.e., alarms, alerts, beeps, screen overlays, etc. will be restored. This saves a ton of time.

1st - do a soft reset; test
2nd - save all wpts, routes, trails to a SD card. Perform hard reset; test
3rd - if another unit is available, connect it to the HDS 12's cables or connect to bow if not embedded in console; test (I seriously doubt this will mean anything but I don't rule anything out)
4th - this could be done before a hard reset. Complete the first part of 2nd point (Save...); then physically delete wpts, routes, trails, then Purge (provides more memory); then do a hard reset; test

Have you made any changes since it last worked? Like a nearby magnetic field.

Report back. If successful, end of thread, if not, we'll look at further steps and hopefully others will contribute.

Thinking further before posting this, check to make sure iGPS is turned on. If you tinkered out on the water perhaps it got turned off somehow. SETTINGS, NETWORK, GPS... this may be a little different; just going from memory.

Resets are well documented on the Lowrance site or just Google.

Is your unit set for internal GPS or are you using an external GPS antenna? I have read of several occurrences of the internal GPS ribbon cable vibrating lose but before you dig into that I would follow UJC's advice on performing the soft/hard resets.

Soft Reset HDS units
(does not delete user data)
--turn unit OFF
--press and hold the PAGES button
--press and release the POWER button
--release all buttons when the HDS logo appears.


Hard Reset HDS units
(deletes stored user data such as settings, waypoints and trails) Back up your files to a SD card first!

--turn unit OFF
--press and hold both the ZIN and ZOUT buttons
--press and release the POWER button
--release all buttons when the HDS logo appears.

Thanks for yalls help on this! So my fishing partner also saw online that sometimes its the GPS ribbon inside the unit that comes undone as mentioned above. Since the unit was out of warranty, I opened it up and this was in fact the case. Super easy fix and I am not the computer type at all so anyone should be able to do it. Thanks again and I appreciate yalls willingness to help a fellow fisherman out!

Thanks for letting us know the result - so many don't. I had forgotten about the ribbon. I've read that too and will burn that into memory (ha!). I'd still do the other things on the water though; just in case for an easy fix.

Glad you got it worked out. For future reference for anyone looking for a solution to to a similar problem here are a couple of photos of the ribbon cable in question.

Thanks MAK747. Great add.