Does Recharging a portal have an internal “hidden” cooldown

It does require you to be online BECAUSE it is GPS bound AND the system needs to verify that you are actually near the portals you are working with - in real time.

For that it needs to read your GPS signal and transfer it to the game servers. Further, once you interact on the same portal as someone from the opposition in real time, the game needs to be aware of that. An offline mode would not allow this.

If an offline mode would be working, you would be able to cheat the game by just pretending to be in a certain location.

It looks like in the portal hacking phase, the level used is the "rounded" level.

• the XM cost is based on the portal level
• the attack you can receive in response of hacking an enemy portal is based on the portal level

It sounds logical that items dropping is related to this "rounded" level.

As far as I experienced it (i'm now level 7), to get high level items, I have to hack "real" high level portals.

A portal at level 5.75 ( 7+6+6+6+6+5+5+5, made by 1 L7 and 1 L6 player) will still give me less high level items than a real L6 portal ( 7+6+6+6+6+6+6+5 made by 1 L7 and 2 L6 players).

I never get any L8 items from portals that were at lavels 5 or 5.25 or 5.75, the first time I got some was when hacking a real L6 portal :D