Thanks All for your replies... 'always' was on the trip yesterday. It's not done it before. But where there was a road running along side the one I was on, it would put me on it.. Then it typically came back to the right road if there was nothing either side.
The lines all over the place could be a weak signal where I live I'd guess. i've not been in all those directions for sure as I'd be up grass banking and so on (never in your own back yard
)
Zoomed in as it is, I don't usually have it like that so this could be an issue for sure.
When you say 'position accurately is on the way out'.. can they fail over time?
OK, we now know several things, I think.
1. On the day it happened, you were not riding a route per-se, you were just riding along. You noticed (presumably when zoomed right in) that the cursor had you riding along, not on the road you were on but on one running parallel, apparently 30’ away. This phenomenon stopped when there was no road parallel to the one you were riding. I guess this means the device then behaved normally, or did it have you riding 30’ away through a field, continuously?
2. It has happened on one ride. See if it happens again, please. If it does, does it also do it if you ride a pre-set route that is say, take me from A to B, A being home and B being somewhere say 20 miles away? If it does, is it continuous? In short, we need to work out if it was a one of glitch (exacerbated perhaps if you were maybe zoomed right in) riding along with a weakfish signal, or if it really is ‘always’ happening. If it is, under what circumstances. I chose 20 miles as that is a reasonable enough distance, 20 yards down the road ain’t going to do it.
3. We know the cause of the mass scribbled tracks, all accumulated around your house. Deleting the track log will remove them. They are not in themselves sinister..... or shouldn’t be.
To answer your additional question, I had a much used Nav IV which lost its ability to track satellites / display my position correctly. It was long out of warranty but Garmin agreed to exchange (if I recall correctly) if I made a modest contribution from my side. We don’t see masses of reports on these pages of the same thing occurring, so I guess it’s quite rare. It happened first overlooking Geneva and then got steadily worse as we headed back towards Luxembourg over the next few days. Eventually it would not pick up any signals at all, even when stationary in the middle of open countryside. I put it away and took my maps and paper and pencil out, Boy Scout style.
PS I see an almost identical massed set of scribble around where I live and often when I go away. Satellite signals and the ability to track them in a comparatively basic device are not perfect. The device doesn’t always see all the available satellites and there are not always enough to be seen to get a complete picture. The signals bounce off buildings and sometimes off solid rock. I get it a reasonable amount where I live in central London in a mews. I sometimes have to walk maybe 20 yards to get a signal at all, most often when I am turning on a brand new device, hunting satellites for the first time, the device’s default position being in Taiwan.There is also a total blind spot about 600 yards away, where not even my phone works reliably.
You can see the sometimes unreliable satellite fixes if you look at tracks that a device records. Sometimes these will be offset from the actual road by some distance. Sometimes the track will have lost all its signal data for a short distance. You sometimes see it when the screen suddenly ‘snaps’, the bike’s cursor position ‘jumping’ as it sort of catches up with itself or, if it loses itself, you sometimes get an off route warning, when you are not off route at all. Most of the time this really does not matter, particularly as few of us ever ride along with the screen zoomed right in or our eyes glued to it.... sometimes you just have to do a little work to help the dumb (but really quite clever) device out.