945 LTE LiveTrack not sending notifications?

I've had my 945 LTE for a few days now and I decided to try out LiveTrack this morning. I went to LiveTrack section of the "Run" activity settings, flipped on "Auto Start" and chose a recipient. After that, I went back to the main activity screen and once the "LiveTrack Ready" message showed up, I started my run. I figured something was wrong when I didn't get any spectator messages during the run and sure enough, my recipient hadn't gotten an email or anything. After I got home, I added my own email as a recipient and tried a few more times but never got a notification. Nothing in the spam folder either.

Has anyone gotten this working yet? Am I missing a step here or something? I've tested out the emergency stuff and I'm able to send and receive messages so I'm pretty sure the LTE connection is working fine.

  • I hadn’t tried to use Live Track but seeing your post made me curious. First thing I did was go to my contacts in Connect and add myself so I wouldn’t be sending alerts to any friends or family at 11 o’clock at night and noticed that when I saved I got a mean sage telling me that contacts would be updated to my Fenix 6, FR945, and Enduro (yes I have a problem) on next sync but didn’t mention the 945 LTE.

    But I went ahead and started a run with Live Track and was able to add myself from the watch so it must’ve transferred okay. I waited until I got both GPS and Live Track Ready before I started the activity and got no notification despite waiting for 3 minutes. I tried again with the same results. After checking my contacts again and syncing the watch I tried a third time and this I kept an eye on the watch and noticed that almost immediately I got a “Live Track disabled” message on the watch.

    So it looks like things aren’t working right with this feature at launch. Which is a problem since it’s supposed to be the stand out feature on this device.

    Of course I wasn’t thinking about the Strava Beacon so I did end up sending those alerts to my son and a friend. Joy

  • Thanks for checking. I guess it makes me feel better that it's just not working for anyone and it's not that my $650 watch is a dud. Sucks that I'm paying a monthly fee for features that don't work, though.

  • After last nights failures I tried to see if Live Event Sharing would work and it does. When I started the session I got a notification via SMS on my phone within about 30 seconds. I followed the link and was able to see a map showing that I was sitting at my desk, and sent my self a message that came across almost instantly.

    But regular Live Track still doesn't seem to work the way it should even though I was no longer getting the "Live Track Disabled" message when I started the activity.

    I went to the support site and pulled up the manual and don't see anywhere in there that I'm missing a step or doing anything wrong.

  • I tried it today, and same as you, no notification sent.

  • Okay folks, I just did a live chat with support. Double check that email is enabled in your Garmin Connect app. Somewhere along the way it got switched off on mine which was the problem.

    Go to the Safety & Tracking section, select LiveTrack, the hit the options menu (3 dots in the upper right corner on iOS, I don’t know about Android) then select Settings and turn email on. After doing that I got the message no problem within a few seconds of starting an activity.

    Also as further information if your watch is still on 2.03 there is a 2.07 available through Garmin Express. I’m going to wait until tomorrow to do the software update, but LiveTrack via LTE is working for me after enabling email in the Connect app.

  • Ha! That was it! I'm positive that I've never been in that menu so I suspect that it's off by default. I've had a case open with Garmin and I've been emailing with them, sending them logs, etc. all day and that hasn't come up yet so thanks for figuring that out. 

    Hopefully they'll figure out a more intuitive way of getting this working. 

  • I assumed (fill in joke here) that it was on for my account because I’ve used it many times with other watches while paired to my phone. My guess is that an update of Connect at some point reset it to the default “off” setting. With no races for the last 18 months I’ve had no reason to try to use the feature to see that it wasn’t working.

    When I was using a 735 as my main watch my HRMax would get reset to 220-age every time Connect updated and screw up my Vo2Max score.

    I’m glad it was a simple fix.

    To your comment about making it more intuitive. I think adding the option to turn on email, and explaining why, during setup would be a good idea. Maybe I’ll drop a line to DCR and see if he can push it to Garmin. Not that I have any “in” with him, just talking about a comment on the article about the watch or on Twitter.

  • Yesterday my watch did not send a LiveTrack email for my run. I did have the email option on. I tried many times to start runs with no luck. I finally decided to turn the watch on and off. That fixed the problem. This morning LiveTrack worked fine.

  • My watch refuses to start a LiveTrack session with LTE. It does work when connected to the phone. When not connected I see a good LTE signal and get a LiveTrack ready message, but the session doesn’t seem to start and the notifications aren’t sent.

    Any ideas? Support seems stumped.

  • That sounds very similar to the problem I was having.  I turned the watch off and on again and the LiveTrack notifications started working again.  I hope LiveTrack does not need regular reboots to continue working.