Edge 830 fails to start recording distance

Have you made sure you have a GPS lock before you start the rides?

1550969 Does this only happen at the beginning of your ride or does this happen throughout your ride as well? 

What is the GPS mode that your Edge is set to and do you wait for the GPS to be ready prior to beginning your activity as Wongataa had asked?

You can use the link HERE to see how to check the GPS mode. 

Lastly, does the Edge have a clear view of the sky or is there anything above it that could obstruct its view of the satellites?

Update:  It happened again today. I believe I had no GPS and waiting for it to acquire would not help (more on that later). On the opening screen where you select “road,” “Mountain” etc,  I cannot see the small icon that shows the GPS status without my reading glasses. I could swipe to see the next screen that shows larger GPS bars but I rarely do that. Since this failure happens frequently, I’ll do that now.

Hey Garmin, here is what I think is happening:  I believe the 830’s GPS chip sometimes fails to initialize properly. It will probably never acquire GPS without a total restart of the 830. When it starts properly, it acquires GPS in just a few seconds. So why not automatically reset or restart the GPS chip after five seconds if it hasn’t acquired a GPS signal? If hardware constraints will not allow this, then flash an alert on the screen that indicates that I have no GPS. Let me know that I need to reboot the 830 to acquire GPS before I start my ride. This would save much frustration.

Thanks.  See my update.

Thanks. See my update.

1550969 said:

So why not automatically reset or restart the GPS chip after five seconds if it hasn’t acquired a GPS signal?

It can take longer than that to acquire a GPS signal so that isn't a good idea.

So I'm supposed to wait forever? That makes no sense. How about if it hasn't acquired one bar in 10 seconds, flash an alert on the screen. Do something to let me know I've got a problem!

What is the GPS mode that your Edge is set to? You can use the link HERE to see how to check the GPS mode. 

This latest time this happened, did your Edge have a clear view of the sky or was there anything above it that could obstruct its view of the satellites?

Also, if  the GPS icon is too small on the home screen, you can swipe down from the top to access the Widgets loop and see the GPS strength on there as well, this may be a better way for you to make sure it has acquired prior to beginning your ride. 

Thanks, Eric.

Mode is GPS + GLONASS.

I have a clear view of the sky when I start. When I run into this problem, I get zero bars no matter how long I wait. If I turn off the 830 and restart, I get full bars in two seconds in the same location. I now realize that I should always swipe to see the status on the larger GPS icon. I didn't think to do this because I didn't fully understand this quirky startup behavior. But I shouldn't need to. A user-friendly design would alert me that I don't have GPS lock, no matter what the cause. In my case, it appears to be a hardware glitch. I'm just trying to suggest a tweak that might help many users.

As I said previously, an aggressive change would be to reset the GPS chip 10 seconds after startup if it is getting zero GPS bars. A simple approach would be to splash a "No GPS" alert on any screen 10 seconds after startup with no GPS signal.

--Regards--

Have you tried the other GPS settings? I find that GPS only works better than the other two options.