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GPS Issue - Forerunner 235

pigabriele
over 6 years ago
Hello everyone,

happy owner of a Forerunner 235 since two years, I am now facing a major issue I cannot seem to fix.

The watch has been working well with minor glitches for close to 2 years until Monday 23rd when it ran out of battery while sleeping. No big deal I would assume, plugged it in in the morning and started charging, once at 100% I put it on and soon understood something was amiss, this is the status as we speak:

1 - the watch would not find ANY GPS signal, no matter how long it stays under clear skies. I also travelled a bit in the last days, it never picked up ANY signal whatsoever
2 - no more sleeping patterns recorded, it does not record when I fall asleep or wake up, if I put manually the times in connect there is no movement recorded
3 - I can manually adjust the time of course, but every time I try a soft reset the watch reverts back to Monday 23 at 7am, and I cannot adjust the date manually

What I tried so far:

1 - simple soft reset and leave the watch alone for 1hr + - FAIL
2 - reset + delete defaults - FAIL
3 - hard reset - FAIL
4 - manual firmware downgrade to 7.10 and update back to 7.50 - FAIL
5 - sync with Garmin exress and with phone - this works but GPS still dead

My last option I could think of is now to let the watch drain its battery completely, in the hope this causes some kind of deeper shut down of sort, but my expectations are nice and low.

Pretty bummed about this, the watch has been great and going strong but its starting to look I have to fork out for a replacement. Anybody else had similar issues?

Cheers!

Gabriele
  • 0 over 3 years ago

    The exact same scenario with mine.  I've tried everything - default settings, sync with Connect, going outside on a clear day for what should have been enough time for it to connect.  The only good thing is it gives me an excuse to buy the new woman's watch they recently released.  Sad though, even my old Garmin Vivoactive still works.

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to JohnHed

    So IF your watch is out of warranty you could do this.

    If your watch is in warranty tell Garmin tech support that this worked and ask repair department to investigate.

    I have extensive experience working with electronics repair so when my watch was out of warranty I thought I had nothing to lose.

    So the solution is a easy fix for someone with : a soldering iron

                                                                              : a hot air gun ( very similar to hair dryer)

                                                                               : Super glue

                                                                               : A small piece of fine gauge wire ( very thin wire, like you would get in an old pair of wired headphones).

                                                                                : Scalpel

    Basically 

    Turn watch off

    after gently heating up the outside of the watch in 20 second bursts of heat, 10 seconds rest total of 1 min 30  use a scalpel to gently run the scalpel between the watch face and the body.

    When you feel the watch face move pry gently upwards to gently separate the upper part of the watch with the Garmin name shown, this should then come away.

    Be advised that the lower part of the face is still going to be attached by two connectors on flexi ribbons.

    Remove the thin strip of blue tape  straddling these connectors, then lift each connector away from the internal body.

    Put the watch face aside for now and locate the two torx screws, undo and slowly remove the internal body.

    You should now be able to see a black semi circle object sitting on the top of the external body, this is the GPS antenna, On my device the tracks where corroded

    so I soldered the ends where the track was cut and soldered a fine piece of wire.

    Then reassemble, sync to Garmin express and go outside in about 2 min,  GPS signal.... Presto 

  • 0 over 3 years ago in reply to JohnHed

    You already did. Thanks!

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    I had the same issue, and just restored factory defaults on the watch and that seemed to sort it out. 

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Same here, seems that solution to get another one but not from them. Feel like using something not well developed, painful to use… gps signal is inexistent since I bought it, and I have been doing many workarounds to fix or keep using it. But you what, throwing away soon.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to JohnHed

    Has to be a joke mcgiver..

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Check your GPS firmware version.
    If you see 0.00 then its a hardware issue and your only option is to contact Garmin support.