I did find a little bit of info on the StreetFinder's receiver. Link follows:

The review you linked was for a laptop-connected "mouse shaped" model. I do not know if its guts are in any way related to the Palm3 model I got.

Probably a cost saving measure that relied on the Palm for initialization.

Even when I used the Palm software, this thing had long acqusition times. It's even in the manual for the Palm software as being "normal".

Your Time To First Fix will probably never get better than 90 seconds or so as the receiver would not output any solution until it collects a valid ephemeris from each satellite it is going to use.

90 seconds would be a dream.

This seems to imply that almanac and last known position data (and more) are stored in EEPROM, not requiring a battery (see page 6-12, 13).

Well, I know that the receiver instantly spits back its last known position as soon as it starts talking to the serial port. So that part is true for sure. Dunno about the almanac/ephemeris data.

If this applies to your receiver then all that is needed is time initialization.

If true, then why didn't that timecode patch improve my acquisition times? Was it because of some kind of a timezone-off error? For example, my player's timezone is set to GMT-8 which is PDT. Should I have set my player's timezone to GMT before trying that patch? I would have figured the patch was smart enough to convert my timezone to GMT before sending the time.