Solved: Widget shows 'Waiting for GPS signal"

Bit said:

With Location Accuracy on, the auto altitude calibration also started to work (sets the altitude to ground level).

When setting up GCM there is a request (IIRC) to allow location access to be set. There were changes to the iOS that took away the automatic setting of Always. Now, the setting needs to be manually set to Always. It makes sense that this needs to be on Always to ensure the phone is always aware of location in order to ensure GPS information provided to the watch is as good as can be. If the GPS position of the phone is off then it follows that any altitude calibration based on the phone GPS is also likely to be off. Especially important for night calibration when I'd guess the phone's GPS location is what is passed to the watch for calibration.

I had given Connect access to location, and in the phone's settings Location was set to On. But I never enabled the "Location Accuracy" setting (uses Wifi, Bluetooth). Now it turns out that, since a few weeks, some widgets (and nightly altitude calibration) will only work if that Accuracy setting is 'on'.

The same happened with the Fenix 5 Plus here; the same widgets stopped working on that one also, and will work if the Accuracy is 'on'.

Bit too much hassle & battery drain on phone for me, I deleted the widgets and I'm am fine with auto alti calibration not working.

btw, allowing location services to use wifi/bluetooth as needed is essentially 'free' from a battery standpoint.  It only piggybacks on the regular scan that phone is doing to try and join wifi or look for BT devices (and it turns off if not doing those scans).  So there is no power savings from turning this feature off.

(I'm an android app developer that has made a fair number of location based apps)

It's good that you mention that. You are right.

I turned off location services entirely, not just the enhanced accuracy, more out of principle than anything. Why have it on, and maybe it saves a few tiny picowatts. (Connect was the only app using location services).

Another update on this: it was only a temporary fix, it worked for a few days, and on an off for half a day, sometimes.

According to Garmin the new behavior (a new GPS fix needed every time the widget is activated, instead of only once after a reboot) is the expected behavior.

Guess I missed something in the change log. Or something. Or the way that it worked like it did for 4 years on multiple devices was a bug that's now fixed. Thanks for that, then.

punkgeek said:

So there is no power savings from turning this feature off.

Unless you live in a rural area.

Personal experience over several Android devices when 'Improve Location Accuracy' is 'On' resulted in increased battery drain and degraded location accuracy. (I have no experience with Apple devices for location accuracy and battery usage for comparison.)

There is only one cell tower serving my area (the next is approximately 28 miles miles away) and most WiFi access points are not near public rights of way so Google has most of them at the wrong location. Bluetooth devices with a known location, if there are any, are few and far between.

Bit said:

According to Garmin the new behavior (a new GPS fix needed every time the widget is activated, instead of only once after a reboot) is the expected behavior.

I’m not sure that is correct. When not active, location information is supplied from the phone via GCM. This data is then used to calibrate the altimeter. No location information from the phone and it can be expected that services that require such information will not function. 

This was not about the altimeter. But about for example Hunt & Fish, and some (calendar) widgets that use moon phase. Not many people use these. I shouldn't have mentioned it I guess. It's just confusing things.