Bluetooth connection not working

I doubt the radio is shot. Is this iOS or Android? Rebooting the phone and the watch might solve your issue. Try pairing your VA3 to another device if you can.

I'm constantly having to futz around with my BT - sometimes it's the phone, sometimes it's the watch, sometimes it's the Garmin Connect Mobile app - I believe BT is inherently wonky (I have a TON of various BT devices - I mean a real literal crap-ton of various things). Basically I run through a series of steps like (in no particular order):
Turning BT off and back on again, on the phone
Doing the same thing on the watch
Killing the Garmin Connect Mobile app, on the phone
Those usually fix it. As a total last resort I might power cycle one or both of the devices, but that's rarely needed.

I'd say on average I have to do that BT process once a day, maybe every other day. I don't worry about and just roll on with life....

There seems to be a timeout of sorts - not sure whether it's with the watch or the phone but I am constantly having to close and then reopen Garmin Connect on my iPhone to get it to reconnect to bluetooth. Seems like after a period of inactivity it loses the connection. It really annoys me. I really wish it just had wifi so it wouldn't be an issue.

Thanks for the input.

Pshare, this is on a Note 8. It's beyond a simple power cycle I'm afraid. The Bluetooth had been pretty spotty leading up to this (similar to what runfreddyrun and Neil mentioned). I've reset the watch, cleared cache and data on the Connect app, literally every troubleshooting steps one could think of and still nothing. I'll give it a shot on my wife's iPhone 7 before I send it back in to rule out my phone as the issue.

Edit: No luck on the iPhone 7 either, unfortunately.

Presumably your Note 8 is on Nougat. There's a big thread in the forum about Nougat issues. The other thing I have found is that if you're paired to 2 devices and both have bluetooth on and are nearby, the watch gets confused and the connection becomes unreliable. Try turning off one of the bluetooths just to see if it helps.

I don't think it's Nougat since it won't pair with the iPhone either. I reset the watch again before trying to pair with the iPhone so it shouldn't be the multiple devices issue. Pretty weird situation. I know it's fairly rare to have hardware issues on devices like this nowadays but I can't think of anything else.

There seems to be a few threads with BT problems. I have tried to pair a new iphone8 with fenix 3 HR and the phone is unable to detect the watch. Tried some of the workarounds (turn off BT and location services, reset) but nothing works. The BT connect just times out without detecting the watch. Worked OK until yesterday on my iPhone 7 IOS 11 an same OS on watch. Deleted the old phone but just can't detect the new iPhone 8.

Hi

I am also unable to connect to my iPhone. See below though. There is clearly an known issue

https://support.garmin.com/faqSearch/en-US/faq/content/O2rhfvdmhY6uQSUVU3Qvv8

yeah, at this point there are issues with GCM pairing on both 7.1.1 and iOS 11

I always have to power cycle my Note 8 and the watch to get them to re-pair or it times out every time without fail. If you've tried that, not sure...

yeah, at this point there are issues with GCM pairing on both 7.1.1 and iOS 11

I always have to power cycle my Note 8 and the watch to get them to re-pair or it times out every time without fail. If you've tried that, not sure...

Yea, unfortunately I've tried about everything. I'm unable to get the Connect app to find the watch regardless of what I do. Pretty disappointing. The only thing I haven't done yet is to factory reset my Note 8, but I don't have much of a desire to do that (nor should I have to).