Garmin LiveTrack beyond 24 hours (Edge devices)

[Fred Chagnon]

Hey all, 

Wanted to share some recent findings in dealing with Garmin support. 

I opened a support case with them back in the summer to report on the fact that Garmin LiveTrack kills the live tracking session at the 24 hour mark, even while the activity is still running. This makes it appear to anyone monitoring the ride that the session is ended. One can work around this by stopping the activity starting a new one, but I like to keep my brevets and permanents contained in a single GPX file / event, so this workaround is a bit annoying for long brevets. This renders LiveTrack a pretty useless safety contact / dot-watching tool for 600s, 1000s, and the cold and wet 400s where I take my sweet time. 

After months of back and forth, they have acknowledged this issue, and reported that it will only be fixed in the Edge 540 devices. My 530 will not be fixed because it is apparently end of life, and they're concerned about the effect this feature would have on 530's the battery life. (The fact that I'm quite capable of managing the battery life myself while on the ride was quite lost on them). 

So it looks like this is where we stand. The Garmin Edge 530 is unsuitable for long brevets. The 540 doesn't support the beyond 24 hour tracking yet, but it will someday. 

Surely competitive devices do this? Any feedback on Wahoo? Hammerhead? Any feedback on these? 

No need to get into discussions about SPOT vs. Garmin Explorer here. This is not a satellite tracker discussion -- I'm looking for a solution for brevets that take place in full cell reception. My SPOT device will get activated only when I'm rolling through the boonies. 

Cheers. 

Fred

[Iwan Barankay]

I use RWGPS on my phone with tracking enabled. Works like a charm plus followers are and to see life the pics you take along the way. 

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[Cesar Villegas]

Without stopping an activity, you can stop/start livetrack sessions in the options menu. Does the 24h timeout still take effect if say, you stop and restart livetrack at 24:01? Again, this is not starting a new activity, just a new LiveTrack. 

[Josh Brown]

You are able to merge activities via the web app. It's pretty straightforward and would leave you with a single gpx file. 

https://forums.garmin.com/apps-software/mobile-apps-web/f/garmin-connect-web/59993/merge-activities-feature

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[Fred Chagnon]

You can stop livetrack while the activity is running. But if you try to start it, it will tell you that you need to end the current activity first. 

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Fred Chagnon
fcha...@gmail.com

[Fred Chagnon]

I wasn't aware RWGPS did live tracking. Not sure I love the drain on my phone -- I was happy offloading this to the head-unit. But this is a good option to explore. (I do certainly prefer the audio cues I get in RWGPS's navigation). 

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Fred Chagnon
fcha...@gmail.com

[Jeff]

Newer garmin units (530/540) will provide audio cues via your phone. Enable this in the garmin connect app under “garmin devices”->device->”audio prompts”->”navigation alerts”. It works/doesn’t work as well as rwgps

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[Theo Goguely]

Strava also supports live-tracking on your phone when you record an activity there, and it has no time limit associated with it. The downside is that it will use up your phone battery faster.

Made for a "fun" debugging/problem solving exercise ~25hrs into PBP when the wife texted me that the tracking link was no longer working!

I can confirm that with Garmin devices, live track automatically stops at 24hrs, and you can not restart the live track while the same activity is still ongoing. I don't know what would happen if you were to stop the tracking at hour 12, only to restart it at hour 25...