MGmaps

I think your results are correct.  I have argued with people on the eternity and impression forums. They claim standalone means no assisted gps. And it should. Some agps's you can turn off the assisted part. But with our phone I dont think its possible.

Not only do you need cell towers to get a connection, you need cell towers to keep a connection. I tested once with mgmaps offline mode.  I had the gps connected and my cached maps working. I drove into a dead zone and lost my gps signal. I went back out and connected again. I returned to the deadzone and lost gps signal again.

So I conclude without the presence of cell towers you cannot get a gps signal or keep a signal. I still have those that argue this but they have never tested it themselves.

I do have an external bluetooth gps receiver. When I use it with mgmaps offline It does keep the signal in deadzones.

Yes they will. I bought mine off of ebay and paid like $20 for it. I had to have this before i founded goatbreaking or we were able to install with TKFE. Before this the gps was locked. We have come a long way since then.

My external is a globalsat BT-359cs and it works quite well.  I recommend it.
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_nkw=globalsat+BT-359&_sacat=0&_trksid=p3286.m270.l1313&_odkw=globalsat+BT-359cs&_osacat=0

With the other phones it is one connection at a time. But cant say for sure with mythic.

I went out today into my local national park on an eight mile round trip hike in a box canyon, far and away from the nearest cell tower. I can confirm that the Mythic does unequivocably have a stand alone GPS no help from any data connections (used with MGMaps). It is not without it's issues and needs some time spent learning the nuances of MGMaps first, but it saved me $300 dollars by not having to buy a Garmin Dakota + trail software.

No. I didn't change any settings in the phone. The only changes I made were in MGmaps. From the default settings I changed the storage path in settings and a few changes to the display settings.