Adjust Auto Start to below 6mph

One thing you will find with the "530" is that it is slow to respond with messages. You will probably find that "Auto Start" has happened soon as you started moving, but the 530's "Flash to bang" response time to alert you to the fact on screen, will happen some time later.

The only way to check it is to zoom in on a ridden activity to see what speeds were recorded you was doing when you start, and after you have had any stops etc. If all the "start" speeds are 6mph and nothing less, then the 530 is not triggering auto start till 6mph. I never use it, so I do not know, I prefer to do it manually.

Mine can take up to 2 minutes just to tell me that I am back on course if I have deviated off it and got back on course, but the 530 in the mean time will be giving me turn by turn navigation in that 2 minutes and distance to go reducing so therefore it has to know that I am back on course, it just has not flashed up a message to tell me.

I'd recommend turning off Auto Pause so you don't have to worry about it restarting.  Both Garmin Connect and Strava still show moving time and moving average speed in addition to overall time and speed with it turned off.  Many difficult mtb climbs can be slow enough to possibly trigger Auto Pause, but you still get all the same stats at the end with it turned off.  The only difference is that the average speed reported during the ride is your overall average, including breaks, but I prefer that anyway.

I have never found a way to make the threshold lower, I used to want this as well.  But now I dislike auto start and have it on prompt vs auto.  Reason being that anytime you're trying to tinker with your unit while in a moving vehicle, you end up fighting the auto start and not able to do what you are trying to do with the Edge.  I'm not convinced that the prompt version of auto start is helpful either though, probably related to what leginswal is saying.  I rarely see a prompt, certainly not as often as when I would fight with autostart when in those moving vehicle situations.

I agree with ewarnerusa and keep auto start on "prompt", as it has saved me from forgetting to record a ride.  But as leginswal says, the message response is slow, so I lost about 1/4 mile of the ride.  But I was still glad to get the prompt and not lose more of the ride.  That being said, to me the real culprit here is "Auto Pause".  If you don't have auto pause turned on, then you only have to be concerned with starting the ride once.  MTB just exacerbates pause issues with very slow technical climbs and likely more breaks in riding, however brief.  I know I beat the "auto pause hate drum" continually, but I see it as the source for a lot of trouble without any benefit of using it.  My buddie's Wahoo Bolt gave him the same troubles until he turned auto pause off.  We don't pause the rides manually either, the clock just keeps running during our brief breaks, but GC and Strava still give moving speeds and times.  And the average speed reported by Strava is still just the average moving speed.  

I will rock on to your auto pause hate drum!  I don't get the reason for this feature, your ride starts when you start and ends when you end and the time between start and end is how long your ride took.  I don't get why one would try to exclude time/data from when one was not moving from the file, all the systems we have for looking at our data will address this for us anyway.

Actually, thinking about the OPs question/issue, this might all be auto pause related... Once the ride is started, the lack of recording on steep hills wouldn't be affected by auto start, it's auto pause that would be the issue.  The ride is started once.  If it is paused, then it isn't really auto start that makes the recording begin again, they're independent as far as I know.  Perhaps srmtr97 should start by turning off auto pause, and leave auto start on if he wants this feature for starting a recording at the beginning of a ride.  That being said, it is way more definite to just push the bottom right Start button once at the beginning of the ride.  I view auto start as a fail safe, not something I want to rely on.

Turn on metric system and check. My autopause settings: 5 km/h MTB and 7 km/h Road.

For timed events, I always turn off "Auto Pause" as its elapsed time that I am interested in mainly, not ride time, I could set up a data field for it but like to keep it simple. For everything else, I use "Auto Pause" set to a speed of "0" and find no problems with using it and makes life easier when training. Otherwise you can end up burning yourself out trying to make up average speeds etc to compensate for all the stoppage time. Perhaps if Garmin had a data field for average speed based on Ride time, then life would be easier.

Looking at my records in my training program, the moment I start riding with "Auto Pause" my speed is recorded 1mph 2 mph 3 mph ect. But, I do not always get a notification when "Auto Pause" kicks in when I stop and cancels itself when I start moving.

In the past on club rides, auto pause has been the cause of issues with club rides. We have a speed restriction of a minimum of 16mph and a maximum of 18mph. On occasions in the past we have had confrontation about the speed of a ride, some riders claim it was too fast being over 18mph, others have claimed it was to slow at 12mph.

The problems relates to those who had auto pause turned on have recorded ride time and have the correct average speed for ride time, those with auto speed turned off, have recorded every pause, cafe stop etc and then end up with an overall average speed based on everything

When I use my 530 for walking, auto pause is always turned off as it is constantly stopping and starting.

When I first read your post I thought you were commenting about auto pause and I could not understand why the setting could not be lower than 6 mph. Concerning auto start, lowering the start speed would not work out very well.

Satellite signals are not always consistent and many users have found that the Edge will start recording when it is stationary sitting on a table. I have seen a new ride startup when walking six feet from the back of car after loading my bike on the rack. If the auto start speed was set lower, the problem would be far worse and I'm sure Garmin realized this when they set the minimum to 6 mph.

I turned off auto start and use manual start to avoid this issue.

As cheracogoff mentions, "Autostart" is no good.

I have never used it on any of my Edge devices and it is probably one of the things that Garmin got right by setting a minimum speed of 6mph

This morning before my ride I had a look at it and straight away confirmed how useless the device would be if the minimum speed could be set to "0"

It would have meant that if I had set it to less than 6mph, it would be walking speed, it would mean that just the action of walking my bike from the shed to the top of the drive would activate the "Auto Start" if my 530 was turned on. 

The only realistic way for "Auto Start" to work with a less than 6mph speed set, would be to get into your start position, turn on the device and then start riding as any other unnecessary movement would activate "Auto Pause".

In 2015 when I rode Paris Brest Paris, if I had "Auto Pause" turned on and the minimum speed reduced to less than 6mph, it would have caused chaos with my timings. I was at the back of about 250+ riders and when we set off, we crawled forward to the start line, soon as I started crawling, the "Auto Start" would have kicked in. If I had left it at 6mph, as we was moving that slow as we crossed the line, it would not have activated till well after the line as we picked up speed.

Basically what I would have had to have done was, in the first instance, stop on the start line, stop the Garmin, cancel what it has recorded and start again. The best solution would be to just use "manual start".

My Garmin Dakota which I use, has an auto start, problem with it when I use it for a ride, it records everything from before I start riding properly from when I turn it on and everything after I have stopped riding up till when I turn it off. When I download my ride, I have to trim everything off from before the ride starts and after it has finished.

If I recall, when I bought my 530, it had Auto start" enabled from the factory which caused me problems till I disabled it as I found that when I went to ride, I would press the start button, but did not know, Auto start had already kicked in, so I was actually stopping the device, and then I could not work out why I had to press the start button twice to start recording, until I discovered that Auto start and disabled it.

The overall best solution is "Manual Start" and also "Auto Prompt" both enabled at the same time. I have not checked if the 530 will do that but the 800 could. If you start riding and forget to manually start, you would see the "Auto Prompt" when you next look at the Garmin and start the device.