Several months ago my 2020 Ford Ranger XLT battery died and I replaced it, and that’s when all the fun started.
Almost immediately, a Sync automatic update kicked off. I had never seen this occur before and knew nothing about it. After investigating a little, I realized it was upgrading from 3.3 to 3.4. Ok fine, but later that same day ALL my truck audio stopped working along with the GPS.
Well, the update process lasted for a few weeks because, as I also learned, it only was in progress while the truck was running in my driveway and connected to my wifi. Two weeks into this, my truck audio came back with a boom, and I mean BOOM, as I was backing out of my driveway and scared me to death. The audio has been perfect ever since, but the GPS never came back.
Two or three more weeks of updating continued before all the packages where finally installed and I saw the software up to date message, but still no GPS. But then I noticed that every once in a while the GPS would start working perfectly, but only for a few minutes before driving me into a river. Checking bezel diagnostics, I noticed that when the GPS was working I had 8 or more satellites and several were green. When there was no GPS (red circle with line thru it on the map), it showed only 1 or 2 satelllites and sometimes none at all.
The worst part is that I typically use Apple maps with car play, and when the GPS decides to wake up, the phone will switch to using the truck GPS, and there’s no way to alter this behaviour. Then a few minutes later the truck GPS goes bad again and I start drifting off the road, and I have to unplug my phone to get the phone nav back on track.
So that’s a lot. My question is, how likely is this all related to the 3.4 upgrade versus a coincidental hardware issue (APIM or antenna), and is it worth it to try downgradiing back to sync 3.3 to see what that does?
SYNC Region: NA
Navigation Variant: Nav
Manufacturer Year: MY20
Install Type: OEM
Old SYNC Version: 3.3
New SYNC Version: 3.4.23188
Do you have a error message, if so what is it?
No
Update Method: Official Ford
