Fenix 5 / "following a course" not working

Former Member over 7 years ago

Hello everyone

My watch is version 8.0.0.0, french configuration.

I used the "following a course" option last week for the first time, and it freezed during the upload of the course. I had to hard reset it, but since the memory of the watch was full of activities and i had synchronized it just before leaving, i let it go.
Yesterday i used again the "following a course" option, and it worked, or so it seemed ... after a couple of hours i was on the trail and the screen freezed on the map i was following. It was impossible to change the screen or to power off the watch. 3 hours later, the famous blue triangle appeared and it was still impossible to power off the watch.
I had to wait until the watch was fully discharged, but even so it was impossible to reset it by normal ops ...
I called the help center and was told of another way to hardreset the watch, but still the option does not work !

Did anyone encounter the same issue ???
Do you know a way of making garmin aware of this bug ?
The watch is pretty good for the use i have of it, but this particular feature sucks ...

0 TrippyZ over 7 years ago

No I haven't encountered this bug. Log support call with Garmin.

0 mcbadger over 7 years ago

How long was it? Where and how did you make it? I followed a 14 mile running route yesterday with no issue, so it's not like the whole feature is broken .

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

thank's for answering.

first time : the watch freezed during the upload of the course, which was an activity i had made 3 months before. The activity was a 42 km trail, the watch was full of activities (but i don't know how much space was left on the device).

second time : the watch was free of activities (since i had hard reseted it 2 weeks ago). i ran with friends for 3 hours, ended the activity, and decided to run backward on the same track. so i used the "following the course" option. it worked well for 2 hours but then it freezed on the map face ... and i could never reset it the soft way. i had once again to hard reset the watch.

one of my friends has a garmin fenix 5 also and it freezed the same way during the "following the course" activity ...

0 mcbadger over 7 years ago

Ah, ok. I think this happens when you're reusing activities like that because the file is so big compared with what a standard route made on the Garmin website or others contains. That's no excuse of course, it's supposed to work and the watch should be designed to cut down the number of points to something it can work with. For planning to repeat an activity you could probably work around it by uploading the activity file to a course creation site and exporting it with the points reduced, but that's no help whatsoever when you're trying to backtrack home.

I think it's a bad bug. If you're running one of the beta software versions, you could try reporting it to the beta team ([email protected]) as well as asking Garmin's helpdesk about it - beta team might actually be able to do something to help. Sorry I haven't got anything better for you.

0 Eddy over 7 years ago

Hi,
I have the same bug.
Try to remake a 10k run using for the first time this function and freeze my watch. My impression is that the memoryoof the watch was all taken and could respond to the buttons. After an hour later I could stop the activity and 30min later discard the activity and reanimate the watch.
It was very frustrating....
I have a 5s.

0 mcalista over 7 years ago

Over the last weekend, I successfully followed a 200 km Course (loaded via Garmin Connect Mobile) on a bike ride. It did take a couple of minutes to load but didn't freeze (displayed "loading" with a circling symbol).

However, many users have noted freezes trying to load a course from a prior activity, possibly because the file size for an activity (which contains time stamps, HR data, etc) is much larger than just the GPS "breadcrumb trail" of a Course.

0 SteveCRunner over 7 years ago

I've had the same experience: Using an old activity, or using trackback leads to a freeze. But if I create a course first in Garmin web interface, sometimes by importing a gpx file, and then uploading to the watch as a course, I find it does not freeze.

0 mcbadger over 7 years ago

However, many users have noted freezes trying to load a course from a prior activity, possibly because the file size for an activity (which contains time stamps, HR data, etc) is much larger than just the GPS "breadcrumb trail" of a Course.

Not just the extra data types, but the sheer number of points as well. Hm, numbers. Just looked at a course from plotaroute.com; it's 7 miles and contains 453 trackpoints. If I run that at 9mm, that's nearly 4000 points at one-second recording. At those rates, your 200km course would be more than that, maybe 8000 points, the 42km track the OP mentions at one-second recording would be maybe 14000 points and the three-hour track over 10000. So either it very selectively falls over at more than 8k and less than 10k, or it is struggling with the extraneous data values as well. The second seems more likely, doesn't it? Very long drawn out way to say I agree with you :)