Garmin Nuvi 500 Time And Date Are Incorrect

Too late now, but I'll bet the 350 snd 360 had different amounts of error showing for position, until they get synced it time. Accurate time is the secret to accurate position.

I actually still have the three sitting side-by-side displaying the time. The Garmin Nuvi 350 and 500 agree with one another, but the Nuvi 360 is four seconds faster than the other two! All are getting good GPS signals, too.

A little later I will compare my Garmin Nuvi 3597 to my Garmin DriveLuxe 51. Certainly they should be in better agreement on time!

As far as position goes, I will have to experiment with that, too!

On way to perhaps do this would be to save your location on all three devices, then go into each and look at the latitude and longitude of the saved location.

Just press and hold the satellite icon and look the FEET Accuracy figure. The one with the faster time should be different.

Thank you for the replies. I went out on a horseback ride for a couple of hours and when I got back, I checked the devices and the 350 and 360 agree with one another. However, now the Nuvi 500 is two seconds ahead of the other two.

I now have both my Garmin Nuvi 3597 and DriveLuxe 51 inside. I am comparing them to one another and to the other devices. At first, I think the 3597 clicked over to the next minute about two seconds before the DriveLuxe 51. After a few minutes, I think they are both clicking aver to the next minute at about the same time.

Back at the dawn of GPS time, they chose a relationship to UTC. But since then they have drifted apart, as UTC occasionally injects a leap second. Of course having a one second discontinuity is completely unacceptable for the navigation purpose of GPS.

So part of the information transmitted by each GPS satellite is the current offset between GPS time and UTC. It is up to the receiver to factor in this offset if it chooses to display time to you, or to timestamp entries in the track log, etc. I think there is variation among different models from different manufacturers in just how they handle this. In particular I think I remember that at least some models don't update the offset any time except on a full cold reboot.

So perhaps if you dig an old receiver out of the drawer, you might temporarily get some error from that source.

The GPS 1024 week system rollover, which occurred on 4/6/2019, caused similar issues on some older Garmin GPSr's. Garmin offered fixes for some but not all.

https://www.sierrawireless.com/iot-blog/iot-blog/2019/10/gps...

I had forgotten about that issue, but we have discussed this problem on the nuvi 5x0 series in another thread: http://www.poi-factory.com/node/49082?page=0#comment-484136. Apparently Garmin never provided a fix for the nuvi 5x0 series.

What is the Effect of a GPS Week Number Rollover Issue? (from https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=zWQY6Z2kFiAuY9kDnDBgZ6)

For GPS devices that are affected, after the rollover occurs, incorrect date and time will be displayed. This incorrect time will also be used to timestamp track logs, compute sunrise and sunset, and other functions that rely upon the correct date and time. However, the positioning accuracy will not be affected. The device will continue to deliver the same positioning performance as before the rollover.

This means Garmin is asserting that their version of the rollover bug is much less severe than I observed on my ancient Magellan, when I turned it on after the first rollover to see how it would do. It was not able to get a satellite lock, so was just an oversized AA battery power discharging device.

Maybe I should put batteries in it and see whether it likes this second rollover any better.

Anyway, this issue is not the answer to the originally posted question.

Now that I think about it, the World Time Clock function is yet another thing that has vanished from the newer Garmin GPS devices. I still recall when MP3 players were common on some Garmin Nuvis!