So when I got my Brittany pup last year, I bought a Alpha/TT15 set. NOT CHEAP, but that is what all my hunting buddies use and we want to be able to track each others dogs. I bought it in mid March. ( cabelas 20% coupon)

During the latter part of Quail season, I had a couple of instances where the collar was communicating with the Alpha, but it was way off on the direction and distance. YOu'd turn the collar and alpha off\on a time or two and it straightened out. I called GArmin on this. They walked me though some trouble shooting and updating the firmware. No improvement, so I told them I would send it back for repair as soon as season was over.

Well, it did not act up in February, and I forgot about it. Last weekend, we took the dogs to the LBJ Grasslands and the collar was fubar. It never got a GPS lock. Training functions worked, but it does not know where the dog is. I fooled with it twice more this week and the GPS in the collar is apparently hosed...and the Warranty was out mid March, so I screwed up on not getting it back to Garmin in time.

I called GArmin support today to get my $99 RMA number for an Out-of-Warranty repair. The tech asked if I had been through the troubleshooting steps. I told him I had. He said it would have to come back for repair. I told him about messing up and missing the warranty deadline. He typed a minute, then said he found the notes on my call in January! Since they had documentation that i was having problems before the warranty expired, they will swap out the collar at no cost.



Most other companies would have told you tough turds. That's pretty good customer service in my book

It may just need a new antennae

Love Garmin.

I know you posted this to talk about Garmin and not to troubleshoot. But I can't help but ask: Is the problem that the handheld doesn't work at all, or just that it has lost track of the collar? If it is just not communicating with the collar, there is a simple fix that might or might not work. On the handheld, you delete that collar, and then you reinitialize it. It's fairly simple if you have the manual. I had a problem that sounded just like yours, and that fixed it in five minutes.

Any magnet near your hand held will do this

I haven't heard that, and I'm not sure how a magnet would affect the handheld. I do not know for sure what caused my problem. Online, people say that the collar shorts out. The charging terminals on the collar are exposed. So if the dog is wearing another collar with metal, and the metal from the other collar touches various of the terminals at the same time, it shorts. That made sense to me, because my dog was wearing a metal collar when the problem happened.
But I don't have confirmation of this from Garmin.
Regardless, if your handheld no longer communicates with the collar, the first thing to do is try to erase the collar on the handhold and start over. Worked for me.

I appreciate the help, but we've covered all those bases.
The collar communicates with the Alpha and the training functions work fine. The collar never locks on the gps satellites
Done a full reset of the collar and the Alpha. Updated firmware while we were at it.
The Alpha works with other collars. We tested the bad collar with another alpha

OK, sorry.
Should anyone else read this, it might still be useful to know that some users of the Alpha have found that you have to be careful not to let the metal contact points on the collar touch metal from another collar. But clearly not your case.