Garmin Edge 500 - slow to find satelites?

[jbcow]

Hey everyone,

My Garmin seems to take for ever to find satelites. And it seems to be getting worse. For example, yesterday I managed to ride 4k's from Annandale towards Centennial park before it started working. Most of that was open to the sky.

Does anyone else have similar experiences? Any tips?

Cheers

[Trouty]

I have the Garmin 800, and it only has trouble finding satellites occasionally when it is cloudy, but it soon finds them quick enough.

[jbcow]

Thanks for the tips, let me see how I go.

[Eleri]

I have an Edge 800 and a Forerunner 405. Sometimes we take both of them outside at the same time and the 800 finds the satellites much faster than the 405 which sometimes takes ages. All that tells you, though, is that there is variability between devices and it isn't the weather or clouds or something.

[T-Bone]

I think i've got a similar problem. It doesn't take excessively long to find satelites, probably too long, but it has been dropping out a bit on occasions (speed to 0km/h). I'm guessing clearing the satelite cache will hopefully help, or at least remove any picked up in grafton, victoria, tassie, that i don't really need.

[jbcow]

I'm going to try cache reset on the weekend. Thanks all.

[christian]

I'm guessing that what it refers to as the satellite cache is the almanac, which is the GPSs list of what satellites should be in view at the current time. If the GPS has been off for a while then the almanac will be out of date and it has to get the current one, which comes from the satellites. If you clear its cache it will take longer to get a fix the first time as this is whats referred to as a cold start.

I can't see how clearing the cache will make any difference really as if it is out of date it will lock eventually. Keep in mind that the GPS satellite constellation is not perfect and there are times when a reliable fix is hard to obtain, if you happen to turn your GPS on at one of these times it may take a while for it to get a valid initial fix. These problems don't just affect cheap GPSs like the Garmins or the type in car nav systems, I've also seen it happen to the $25k GPS I have at work.

[rhys]

I find that mine doesn't acquire satellites when I'm moving. It takes a while, but not too long when I'm stationary. A few people did the firmware update and had problems like this, but it seemed to fix itself.

[Karzie]

I'm going to try cache reset on the weekend. Thanks all.

So what happened with the reset?

[geoffs]

I turn mine on when I first bring the bike out of the house so it can locate the satellites while I am putting my shoes on. If I start moving before it locks on then it will take ages for it to work. If this happens just stop somewhere where u have a clear view to the north for under a minute and it will find them