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@bothwell
IIRC the garmin (and the strava app) caches your GPS coordinates for faster lookups, so if you suddenly switch it on thousands of miles from where you used it last, it gets upset by the difference and has to spend more time pinging satellites for info. I think it needs someting like 8 satellites to be able to get a proper fix on you, so depending on what's actually overhead at the time it can take a while to pin down a non-cached location. The phone app is supposed to be a bit quicker because the phone GPS can also use mast triangulation to get your location, but if you're in an area where there aren't many masts then that won't give you much of a speed boost.
That said, my phone's GPS is absolute shite and it's why I got a garmin in the first place. If I'd had one more broken map on strava I'd have chucked the fucking thing in the Thames.