Forerunner 255, problem with GPS after updating to 20.32. slow, inaccurate.

I've been using this 255 for a couple of years now and never had any issues. However, after the 20.32 update a few days ago, it's been having issues with GPS. Normally, it'd find signal within 30 seconds of being turned on in front of my house. Now it's taking minutes. It's exactly the same spot, same environment, nothing changed other than the firmware update.

Also, on a bike ride a couple of days ago, it'd lose GPS signal all the time and couldn't calculate the speed. After I got home, I also noticed that the mileage was not accurate and a big chunk of the track was a straight-line. Here's the activity:

https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/17270389229

If you zoom in, you'll see the northwest section of the track, west of Lake Washington, is a straight-line and par of it is in the water. I certainly didn't bike on water :). And this is a stretch I've biked and run literally hundreds of times and it's a super busy stretch if you look at Strava's global heat map, one of the busiest trails in Seattle. It's not covered by dense trees. The lake side has clear views of the sky.

The same happened to a run yesterday. It's my routine route. I know every pothole of the route and I know the distance to the second decimal place. The mileage was off by ~0.2 miles out of 6.28. I have never seen it off by this much. The variance has been plus minus. 0.02 miles, usually.

Has anyone else been experiencing the same problem after this beta update? My "Satellite" setting was set to "auto select". I'm going to change it to "all systems" today and see if it makes a difference.

  • Could this be a coincidence with the recent solar storms and increased aurora activity in October?  I haven't been paying attention to the exact dates since I'm pretty far south in California...

  • Huh, interesting theory! I live in PNW so we do pay attention to solar activities. There was a once in a century aurora light event back in May and it didn't seem to have impacted any of my electronic devices permanently. There have been a few smaller ones in the past few weeks, but the timing doesn't precisely match. 

  • Huh, that actually solved the issue. It's a huge PITA to reconfigure the watch now. But at least the GPS is getting ready in seconds, not minutes. Thanks for the suggestion!

  • You should have used the backup/restore feature.

  • Sigh, the problem came back after a few days. In this activity: https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/17375598470, the first 6-7 miles were completely cut off. The GPS was only ready half an hour after the ride started. I'm going to reset it one more time. This is getting very frustrating.

  • The problem still persists. On a 10 mile bike ride yesterday, The GPS tracking only started after ~8 miles.

    Is there a way to roll back to a previous version of the firmware?

  • No, Garmin doesnt allow the Forerunner series to rollback firmware, very frustrating yes, i wish they are taking care of this, because if this continues this way, they will lose lot of customers, the firmwares since 18.XX is having lot of issues, many months ago, i dont understand a company that big like Garmin having this issues...

  • just wait until the next firmware update

  • Well, remember that global outage that lasted > 5 days in 2020? It blew my mind that something like that could happen on such a scale to a well established company. I work for Google and a 10 minute outage of any of our services is a major incident and serious actions would take place immediately. All new feature development would halt and all resources would be devoted to preventing it from happening again. But, I don't think Garmin has done anything to mitigate future risks or to improve user experiences if something like this happens again. For starters, the app should *always* be able to sync with the watch without going online. This should've been the design from day 0. I can't wrap my head around why it needed to be online to sync over BLE. This would've improved the experience significantly in that outage. Now, more than 4 years later, this behavior still hasn't changed. This is beyond frustrating.
    And my bigger concern is not my training data. I can live without it. But I'm also an InReach user. People's lives literally depend on the service. I definitely don't have a lot of confidence with Garmin in general right now.

  • Well, I foolishly enrolled in the beta testing program and I'm on 20.32. So, it'll be a while before the public release catches up and wipe out this version. I'm definitely not going to upgrade to a beta version anymore.
    I wish they could provide a way to physically flash firmware over SPI or something.