Compass needs to be calibrated every 2 days. Then it works fine again but I thinks its not normal. My suunto ambit3 compass works fine after several months! How long does your compass work ok after manual calibration? Days? Weeks? Months?
thanks for the welcome and reply Nemo. Last time after it was misadjusting, I didn't do a calibration and left it uncalibrated. I checked it several times during the next days, nothing changed, but somehow after a few days it was suddenly pointing in the right direction again, working properly!! Some kind of autocal. I read it exists on the fenix, just don't understand when and how it can autocalibrate without me making a figure 8. Or does it just picks the settings from an older calibration? I know this is just temp, and that my compass will be misadjusted again within several days. So if more people have a better working compass I will send mine to Garmin.
Just remember: an electronical compass can lost the North by a simple journey in an electric train. Our smartphone's compass can be jammed by recharging the battery. Check if you are surrounded, at some moments, by strong magnetic fields. Also beware of stainless steel bands, they can also make the compass mad.
I recently ran into issues with the compass on my Garmin GPSMAP 64st requiring constant re-calibration. It turned out to be a battery issue. Make sure you use high quality batteries like the Eneloop (and no I am not pushing the product. Low quality batteries can actually produce unclean power and mess things up with delicate electronics.
Narziss, my GPSMAP 64st GPS has an electronic compass that generally works quite well. The GPS itself is powered by two AA batteries. When I put some no-name batteries in the GPS to go on a short geocache hunt, the compass froze several minutes after calibration. This happened several times. When I swapped out the batteries to the Panasonic Eneloop brand that I usually use, the compass problem vanished. Hope this makes sense.
