Compass sensor affected by the springbars

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- Outdoor Product Support

Please note, when wearing your Instinct 2 and your band is properly tightened, your band pins will not rotate and your compass will not be impacted. When you work with Product Support, they will advise you your watch is working as it was designed.

Next you tell me to use witchcraft? I've tried everything and it just doest work. It might work for few seconds but then it's all over the place. I simply cannot trust its reading and it's supposed to be military grade watch to be used in tactical operations.

I never had this kind of problems with much more cheaper CASIO abc watches.

The problem presents itself even with the ORIGINAL Quickfit straps, someone posted a video that clearly shows that. It's, of course, not normal being forced to ricalibrate the watch every time the springbars rotate (again, with the quickfit straps it happens). Furthermore I don't see written anywhere you can't use the watch with any other type of 22mm straps or even without straps (to get accurate temperature readings).

I solved the problem demagnetizing the springbars. After that it works perfectly and no need to ricalibrate it every time.

I came to the conclusion that this is a Garmin fault, the springbars should NOT be magnetized.

I'm using official Quickfit 22 band. Garmin should address this issue and recall these devives and replace these faulty parts for affected customers. But they chose path to blame customers for using their products in a wrong way which isnt true at all. Ridiculous from them especially when you think how expensive these devices are nowadays.

Wow. this is really poor and very dissapointing.
 I am happy I returned my Tactical Solar in time. I am curious how many soldiers will seriously want to depend on this device... boys, we need to go this way... oh wait, my springbars rotated... it might be the other way... wow. 

Don’t for a minute think that any soldier in a situation where a compass is critical is going by to be solely relying on one on a digital watch. Whilst devices like these will certainly have owners in the military, many of their ‘tactical’ features are marketed just as much at Call of Duty wannabes. 

Theres also problem with calibration which many times freezes and wont calibrate at all. Then you need to restart the device. Then it works for some time. Sometimes you can try to calibrate but it just says "retry" forever. And sometimes it manages to calibrate but is about 20 - 50 degress off and sometime it just freezes and wont change at all when you turn around.

At this moment the watch is good as toy. Actually even my kids toy compass works better than this 500$ military grade ABC watch.

I know... dont you worry... but as much as marketing tries to sell us such a story, why not turn that around and really think about such a scenario. 

• Yeah, cuz lots of call of duty wannabes are doing HALO jumps… that’s not an excuse. This is an adventure watch too, has serious navigation features that people rely on.

Only thing matters here is that this watch has a clear design error in its hardware and easiest solution in my opinion is to provide customers new pins made with non magnetizing material. I'm now in contact with local Garmin support and wait what they propose to fix this issue.