Bad experience in big trekking with sending points and detailed track "deactivated"

I just came from a trip to Morocco. In total 13 days of effective trekking. I discovered on the way back (unfortunately for me), that if you activate the sending of points (every 10 minutes), even if you have the detailed track activated, it really takes several points almost together every 10 minutes , making a terrible straight line between those groups of points and the next one, 10 minutes later.

Let's see if I explain it in another way: I always deactivate the sending of points (I have the Safety plan) and activate the detailed track. That combination works perfectly and the track is very detailed and I already mentioned that it is VERY accurate (compared to my mobile).

For this trip, I upgraded the contract to Recreation (good experience changing the plan within the contract). Since they were free, after a few days of trekking, I decided to set sending points every 10 minutes (while keeping the detailed track). My unpleasant surprise on the way back is that, from that moment on, there is no longer a detailed track, but straight lines that join points separated by 10 minutes of walking.

I think it's a Garmin bug. I add that I am a technological person very used to handling maps, tracks, etc. In fact, I am an editor of OpenStreetMap and with those detailed tracks I wanted to introduce new data and corrections in those Moroccan routes (Toubkal and Mgoun).

As for the rest of the experience with the Mini 2, wonderful. All the messages were sent, received, even in the Mgoun canyon, with very, very deep areas... it gives a lot of peace of mind to go through those areas without coverage.

  • Sounds like a bug, and not a minor one. If your f/w is current, open a support ticket. You've done a lot of testing, which will help Garmin duplicate the problem.

  • I don't understand what you mean by "inReach Tracking Enabled/OFF" vs "Activity tracking"?  There is only the one option, Activity Tracking (well, and Send Interval which is a wholly different thing).  There is also Navigation and Tracback; the former implies activity tracking turns on and the latter is always enabled.

  • There are actually 3 different types of tracking that can occur simultaneously and each one handles (stores/sends) the track points separately in different ways.
         
    One type is on all the time, the other two types are optional and can essentially be thought of as being enabled in a two-step staged manner.
         
    TracBack - Internal, on all the time, safety focused. Maintains a rolling 24 hour track log in its own internal file. This ensures TracBack function is always available in the event the other tracking types have not been enabled, their internal files deleted, or no access to mobile phone or network access to track points that may have been sent to Mapshare etc.
         
    Activity Tracking - Internal, optional, normal user tracking information. Started either by manually selecting "Start Tracking" or setting "Auto Track" to on in which case it will start automatically at power on. Maintains FIT files in "Saved" (Device:\GARMIN\Activities) where you can access them. There are two levels of detail available, low resolution battery saving "Standard", and "High Detail" which is the one more akin to the traditional normal tracking many of us are used to. You can have Activity Tracking on it's own.
         
    inReach Tracking - External / MapShare, optional, social focused. Enabled by selecting a "Send Interval" (e.g. moving from "Off") and started by selecting "Start Tracking" or setting "Auto Track" on as above. A different way of looking at the logic is that internal Activity Tracking is a prerequisite, and then this can be turned on over and (literally) above it. It will send one trackpoint via inReach/Iridium to Mapshare at each "Send Interval" you have chosen. And in line with the theme of saving battery (and presumably so you can see where you have told others you are), if you have "Standard" detail selected for the Activity Tracking it will record track points at the chosen Send Interval to the internal FIT file. If you have inReach tracking on then by default you also get Activity tracking.
        
    The caveat is some of this is currently broken.
  • Great troubleshooting, clearly some bugs in the code - hopefully can pass this on to the development team for further investigation and cleanup?

  • Ah, I see what you're saying, thanks!

  • I provided the detailed problem description and test results to Garmin Support...who subsequently replied by directing me to the same link originally posted by Psyches and then again by Garmin-Leslie:

    In Australia we would call this a boomerang, it keeps coming back.

    It also appears at least one user in another thread here, plus a user in one of the other forums discussing this same issue logged support cases on it around 18 months ago.

  • Nope, not sorted yet, but maybe the failures are better understood (see all the latest comments).

  • Yes, please escalate.  And it would be great to reduce the bugs to the simplest possible statements.  In my first attempt (<< Ref:21690014K1 >> I mentioned over a year ago), when talking with Garmin Support directly (*not* Garmin-Leslie) I felt like I was talking to a bot with only 50%-75% of the understanding of the device.  The activity log exports were actually corrupted with bad timestamps and I couldn't get that idea across - at least that appears fixed.  For current bugs, for example:

    1. High Detail log recording is BROKEN with Auto Track set to ON and Send Interval is non-zero.
    2. Standard Detail log recording is intermittent and unpredictable when (yadeyadeya etc...)
  • Posting here will not get the ticket escalated. Whoever opened the ticket will need to contact support again (with the ticket number) and ask to have it escalated.

    I only tagged Garmin-Leslie because sometimes they can help with things like this. Still, the forums are NOT an official support channel. The most reliable thing is to contact support directly and open/reopen/escalate a ticket.