Disable "On course" alert?

I would have thought that disabling the "Off Course" alerts would also disable the "on course" alerts at the same time - I'm quite sure that was Garmin's intention at least, maybe they just forgot to code it that way.

There's currently no way to adjust the "off course" tolerance. I would also like this feature - if I set it to 50m instead of what it is currently (I assume it's like 10-20m) it would greatly reduce the number of false alerts I get when I'm hiking, especially since the courses I loaded are often imperfect (ie, made by strangers online, not myself).

Both of these things are worthy of a feature request to Garmin.

Thanks. Yep, a friend and I both have the Fenix 6X Sapphire and even with "off course" disabled, we both get "on course" alerts!

So odd. I think it must have just been an oversight on Garmin's part, I can't think of any reason anyone would disable "off course" alerts but still want "on course" alerts turned on. Even if it's intentional, there should be another setting for turning them off, then.

C.sco said:

just been an oversight on Garmin's part

Agree, I would havè reported it to beta team as s bug.

C.sco said:

an oversight on Garmin's part

Agree also.

I recall being able to adjust the tolerance on at least one previous unit, probably the F3. Would be good to have that back.

There's a story about one of the early analogue poly synths - probably the Prophet 5 - about how there were a set of gain controls to  adjust the balance of the sound, and if you put them all down to zero then there would be no sound at all. The manufacturers ended up getting so many warranty returns from people who just needed to turn the gain up that they installed pins to stop the slider going to zero. Easier to use but less versatile.

Anyone has had any success with the "do not disturb" setting?

As C.sco writes, a tolerance setting would greatly improve matters (including a large value such as 1km, to essentially disable the on/off alert). As it stands now, the on/off course behavior renders ultra-track totally useless

+1 for off course tolerance setting. This would make a huge difference. An activity such as hiking requires a totally different threshold to one such as cycling IMO.

halfofabanana said:

An activity such as hiking requires a totally different threshold to one such as cycling IMO.

Exactly - for road cycling you might want it to tell you as soon as you're 20 meters off course, but for hiking (especially trails with lots of sharp turns), the tolerance should be more like 50m, or even 100m.

I like getting off-course alerts, because sometimes I do miss a turn and I want to catch it before I go too far the wrong way, but with the way the watch is right now, probably 3/4 of the off-course alerts that I get are "false alarms", caused by mild GPS or course inaccuracies.

Does anyone know if Garmin has fixed this obvious bug. Just got my new Fenix 6 a couple months ago, and every time I follow a course I downloaded (regardless of the activity), the on course alert activates when the 20 m default tolerance is reached after being more than that off course. It is very annoying and burning up the battery.

I reported this to Garmin tech support in April. Annoyingly, their first reply was "Can you send me some pictures of the alert you are referencing? How often do you get this alert? What activity type are you using when you receive this alert?" My description of the problem to support was more than clear enough for the software folks to find and solve this.