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Forerunner 945 LTE dies during activities and resets after latest update

Gio
10 months ago

I bought a Forerunner 945 LTE from garmin.com and received it on Jan 11. I took it out for a walk that day and it worked seamlessly.

At some point between Jan 11 evening and Jan 12 mid day, the watch installed at least one software update. I had seen the message like “sending update to watch” in the app, but I did not start the update, so I can only assume it started by itself.

Since then, my activities crash, often at the 1:04-1:05 mark, with the watch restarting.

See this series of activities. I was swimming in open water between two poles roughly 100m apart.

I read somewhere that it might be a wiring issue, so I started a walk session on the couch. Same result. In particular, same 1:04 duration before the crash.

Between the timeline of the update and the fact that the crash happens at the same duration, I’d say this is a software, not hardware issue. Fingers crossed, I guess. Otherwise, the watch is unusable as a training device, and I'd have to send it back.

I’m based in Australia and experienced the issue on LTE. I saw another post of someone saying they were in Australia when the watch started playing up.

For what is worth, I hereby give Garmin support staff approval to access my data in order to diagnose this issue.

  • 0 9 months ago

    This is still happening - I bought one recently and it seemed great!

    Until I did an update in the process of moving music over via Garmin Express.  Then constant crashing unless LTE was off.

    I thought it might've been because the update had issues due to losing the USB connection mid-update on me, so I tried resetting 6 ways to Sunday - still no luck.

    So I contacted support - they took a while to respond initially but when they did they offered a full replacement of the device.

    I thought "great!"

    It finally arrived, I set everything up on my phone again and did a test "run" on the couch and it seemed fine...

    Then I went to Garmin Express to move my music over again, it did the updates again on the brand new, working device (this time with no disconnect or issues)... and again it is crashing before even acquiring GPS now every time if LTE is on.

    I just reached out to support again - I really hope they can fix this as LTE livetracking and the Safety/Emergency Assistance working without my phone on me for both races and bike/backpacking trips are the whole reason I bought the watch and signed up for the service.

  • 0 9 months ago

    This is still happening - I bought one recently and it seemed great!

    Until I did an update in the process of moving music over via Garmin Express.  Then constant crashing unless LTE was off.

    I thought it might've been because the update had issues due to losing the USB connection mid-update on me, so I tried resetting 6 ways to Sunday - still no luck.

    So I contacted support - they took a while to respond initially but when they did they offered a full replacement of the device.

    I thought "great!"

    It finally arrived, I set everything up on my phone again and did a test "run" on the couch and it seemed fine...

    Then I went to Garmin Express to move my music over again, it did the updates again on the brand new, working device (this time with no disconnect or issues)... and again it is crashing before even acquiring GPS now every time if LTE is on.

    I just reached out to support again - I really hope they can fix this as LTE livetracking and the Safety/Emergency Assistance working without my phone on me for both races and bike/backpacking trips are the whole reason I bought the watch and signed up for the service.

  • 0 8 months ago

    Garmin's Product Support really needs to get it together on this.
    They have exchanged my watch twice, and it has happened with all three watches.

    At first I thought it was the maps portion of the update, but it's the firmware.
    I tried everything to prevent auto-updates, but apparently that's not an option!!!

    No matter what you do with settings in the watch, the Garmin Connect app, OR Garmin Express - it downloads it anyways!
    And there's no real option to postpone installation - if you don't do it right then it'll do it (and thus brick the watch) while you're asleep!
    Yes you can choose "Install Tonight" instead of "Install Now" - but that's all that does!

    It is absolutely absurd to me that not only has this gone on over a month and through so many exchanges, but that Garmin clearly wasn't even aware that an exchange won't even do anything!
    The last exchange I asked "well could I just not install the maps updates?" and they said that should be fine!

    It just so strongly gives off that Garmin doesn't even care about this issue, even though it's genuinely a serious safety issue for anyone who expects these features to work on anything from their commute to a huge bikepacking trip in the backwoods!

    What a massive waste of time for users, risk of safety and ruin of sleep for users and their spouses, and huge waste of money for Garmin too on all the exchanges!

    Ridiculous... I asked for a refund on my LTE subscription and some shipping costs on the exchanges (we'll see what I get), but I'll never get the massive amount of time I've sunk into this back (which I wouldn't have done if support had known it was unfixable at the moment).

    It'll also take a long time for Garmin's reputation to recover for me - it may if they fix this, but the longer they take the more irrecoverable that becomes.

    I bought this watch after being nearly run over by inattentive drivers several times, and to be able to camping without my phone, but still have peace of mind for myself and my loved ones.
    Peace is the opposite of what it's given me so far...

  • 0 8 months ago in reply to 5502182

    I'm on my third one as well. I have checked in with a friend who has an older 945 LTE (he bought it at least a year ago) to see if it has the same issue. He uses the LTE safety features extensively. He has not responded so I'll see him Saturday and check on it, but my theory based on the forum is that all the problematic watches were in a late run of the manufacturing process, since only new purchasers seem to be reporting the problem.

  • 0 8 months ago in reply to ChipGorman

    I mean maybe?  But each of mine (original, replacement 1, and replacement 2) all worked fine with the firmware that shipped with them, and only started having issues after updates.

    Please let us know what's going on with your friend - it would be interesting if it was a combination of firmware and newer hardware and might somewhat explain the difficulty solving it, but even so it's frustrating we can't just revert to the older version nor have the watch stay on the older version for any replacements shipped to us.

    Like what a gigantic waste of resources when all they have to do is give the option to not update to that update or prevent watches (maybe even just certain serial #'s) from updating to that update for now.

    There's other smaller costs I've incurred trying to fix this - for example UPS wouldn't ship mine back to Garmin without buying packaging from them and things like that, but I haven't asked for those as I doubt Garmin can do anything about them and they've already put a lot of resources into all these exchanges...

    But on the other hand it's really irritating and it's not my fault Garmin stupidly keeps doing exchanges to fix a problem the exchanges won't help, and keeps NOT doing any of the myriad of things that would either fix the problem directly (fixing extremely broken firmware after a over a month) or at least would allow the exchanges to fix the problem (not forcing that firmware update anymore).

  • 0 8 months ago in reply to 5502182

    I cancelled my LTE subscription, and lucky I though to do it month by month just to try it out…

    I love the watch and the motivation to exercise I get from having the data. But the situation is ridiculous.

    My guess is this device is too old for them to give it priority during big fixing.

    Support should reach out to us and offer an upgrade option: send back the faulty Forerunner 945 LTE and upgrade to a new model of choice. 

  • 0 8 months ago in reply to 5502182

    My friend with the older LTE watch (~3 years) has it set to autoupdate and has had no change in behavior on the watch.

    Also, a friend showed me how to set the watch to NOT autoupdate. It's under the Settings on the watch itself. I plan to reset my watch to factory today, change that setting immediately, and see what happens. That means no new maps, etc, but hopefully the main functionality I got it for, and subscribed to, will work.

  • 0 8 months ago in reply to 5502182

    Related--on the reboots, it occurred to me that mine were happening frequently when I was on LTE, but not *exactly* regularly. They were about every 2 minutes, but not exactly, and the distance between reboots also varied slightly. I also found if I stared at my watch to see when it rebooted, it did not reboot at the "expected" time (like a watched pot...) But as soon as I stopped looking, and let my arm rotate to regular position when running, that's when it would reboot--so maybe a trigger was the positional hardware that turns the light off and on (though this was in broad daylight and the light was not coming on, I assume the watch knows what position it is being held in.)

    I also did one workout with it on Track mode, and was doing 200m with 200m rest. So, one lap per cycle. It rebooted literally *exactly* whenever I hit the end of the 200m rest--or each lap, in other words, when it would be alerting or logging or something.

    HTH whomever is working on this...

  • 0 8 months ago in reply to Davo29

    I’m commenting to add this has been my experience as well, re: hard reset, do not pair to phone, and watch functions without LTE capability. I have a race coming up, so will use it for my splits and things, but will be returning it because I need the LTE functionality for the LiveTrack features. I also experienced the same issue with the software update creating the bug. Looks like I will be returning mine, trying a new one and turning automatic updates off…ha!

    also, if any Garmin reps are on this thread, maybe Garmin could look into providing documentation about reverting to the old software version? Would be interesting to test if this fixes the issue. 

  • 0 8 months ago in reply to 5114748

    I’m replying to my comment to add I exchanged my watch (purchased at REI) and the new one has worked great. However, I’m a bit scared to update the software so I have not done that. The first thing I did was turn auto updates off. I’m a bit bummed they are discontinuing this watch, which reinforces my precaution of avoiding a software update if possible.