Can a Flex 8400 work with GPS? Bad Distortion without.

Traded in my 6300 for a new 8400 that I received last Friday. Things seemed fine the first couple of days. Today I noticed that audio was garbled after having it on for a few hours. All of the signals on the pan adapter had a weird distortion as well. I was using the 4.15 Windows client so I tried iOS and and had same issue. Restarted the unit and all was well, until it happened again. After having to restart it another time, I default reset it.

It happened again after the reset and this time it did not correct itself. I noticed that each time the TCXO did not say locked. It is set to auto and was searching. Manually selecting TCXO did not produce a lock. The TCXO lock would only last for a while upon reboot.

I did not have a great GPS signal. While it says it sees 13 satellites, tracked was occasionally 3 without a lock. Sometimes the GPS would be warming up for 6 hours until it was in "free run" with no lock.

Got the GPS antenna to a location temporarily where I could get a lock. Distortion went away. I have to assume that this unit can work without GPS and I got a defective unit? Maybe I'm missing something.