GPS antenna - unhacked

Ok, at midnight last night I was working away, testing the UART's on the final board. The strangely the GPS reciever could not pick up a signal at all - it was just refusing to track satellites. The antenna I was using was the hacked down version, where I had removed the case, 90% of the wiring and the base. It seems the base is needed to complete the ground plane - so when this was added back in the GPS picked up the satellites virually straight away and locked on. This brings the weight back up a bit - the moral of the story is keep the ground plane!