Hello all, I’ve never posted something here before, but I decided to do it now(have been lurking for quite a while). I have a good opinion about Garmin in general, I like their products. I love data, and their gear provides it. For a few months now, I’m having problems with getting GPS fixes with my Fenix 6X, sadly like many people.
Basically I work in the field of instrumentation and control and also do a lot of data analysis and setting up automated processing. So I know my fair share of sensors, data and debugging. But there seems to be no pattern. I wouldn’t say it’s an hardware fault, since it has worked flawless, so I keep coming back to bad software or interfaces. I know the setup is in a way sub-optimal (metal casing), I understand the bounds of accuracy and am fine with that. It seems that locations matters a lot, yet I also find situations which seem to contradict this.
The GPS functionality works very sporadic in my opinion. Some weeks it works perfect, other weeks I give up getting a fix and just go. Compared to my Fenix 5 (different chipset, I know) that I used in the past, it is unreliable regarding the GPS. The Fenix 5 was super quick. If I would leave my apartment in Greece, it would get an instant fix in between high buildings, next to a transmission tower. Never experienced any problems like this with the Fenix 5, always fire and forget.
Anyway, I’ve tried to troubleshoot and debug it myself, so here is a list of things I’ve tried. And later numerous examples of the watch working perfect and bad. Lately I’ve been running more with other people, so now I have some good comparisons too. Maybe this is helpful for someone, or Garmin. So I gathered all interesting information I could think of
What I have tried:
- all different gps settings (GPS, GPS+Galileo, GPS+GLONASS)
- for each of these I repeated this method:
- 1. stand absolutely still with the watch horizontal 50 cm in front of you
- 2. turn 90 degrees after 20 seconds
- repeat this 4 times until you get a fix
- This test proved to me that GPS+Galileo gives the quickest fix, not necessarily the highest accuracy. Still, in general I need more then 2 minutes to get a fix with this method. And I would say that in 40% of the cases I can’t get a fix within 2 minutes and I just go.
- Powering on and off (of course)
- resetting to defaults
- removing from Garmin connect and adding it again
- remove CPE.bin, re-synchronize watch, check if CPE.bin was updated via PC and watch (it did update)
- Also checked if the CPE was current, it was
- Also did something in the debug/developer menu (you press a button when starting, don’t exactly remember)
- Never really installed any beta firmwares/software. But made sure I was running the latest versions.
- Except for maps. I’m on a slow internet connection and I use it all the time, so it would take 2 days at least. And not running windows native, and didn’t take the time to setup Garmin express on Linux, so that’s an extra barrier.
- Practically always carrying my phone with me.
Next some examples of GPS tracks:
(text first, photo after)
17-04-2020
Fenix 6X
Same route as 12-04-2020, it is through a forest so tracking could be less accurate. Weather was great, almost no clouds.
Fenix 5
same run, different person
And I cycled there with no problem. Upon arrival I immediately stopped cycling activity and started running activity. It still took ~2 minutes to get a fix, but I didn’t notice the fix was lost after a short distance of running
16-04-2020
Fenix 6X
Waited for 1 minute, then left. But kept arm horizontal while running the first few hundred meters. Got a fix a bit later.
Fenix 5X
same run, different person
There was a third person with a Garmin Instinct Tactical. This watch also tracked perfectly fine.
12-04-2020
Fenix 6X
Same route as 17-04-2020, this time it got a quick GPS fix and it tracked the whole route. This day it was less cloudy then 17-04-2020
(contradicts location dependency)
11-04-2020
Fenix 6X
20 second for GPS Fix, no problems at all.
09-04-2020
Fenix 6X
This is a funny one. I wait for 2 minutes to get a fix (at the location you see in the picture) and it doesn’t work. Again I run with 2 other people and they had no problems getting a GPS fix. After the run we do stretches where we started, and I get a GPS fix after stretching for 40 seconds.
Fenix 5X
Tracked perfectly fine, just as another Garmin. But not the 6X.
25-03-2020
Fenix 6X
I can’t remember how long the fix took here. I want to make clear that this is acceptable to me, with a sub-optimal design and the conditions here (forest) the path can be bad. This could be smoothed in the future by trying to figure out where someone runs (use popularity heat-map, nice data source). Or maybe just fine tuning of the chipset.
Fenix 5X
A very similar watch(construction wise) tracks really good on the same route, this could be due to the use of another chipset. Also it’s older, it had more time to be fine tuned???
There are enough good and bad examples (you can find them on my connect profile) (I’d guess almost 50/50) of getting a GPS fix, so I’ll stop giving them. Instead, I checked which tracks are okay and which are not (in my opinion) and put it in a table. More useful in the end. You can see the plot of the results below(I can give the table if needed, it's big though). From April and onward GPS fixes are sporadically bad
I can’t really trace which software versions were running in the past, since I don’t see any dates in the changelogs.
But it’s visible that it started working bad somewhere between 03-02-2020 and 13-03-2020.
Because it is so sporadic, and it used to work great before (fenix 5 grade tracking), I believe it’s a software/firmware issue. I hope this may help Gamin figure out what is wrong. Or help other people in their decisions.
With kind regards,
Jeroen.
