I’m interested in this for the opposite reason... no elevation whatsoever for the last couple of months. I live in Wellington NZ, a very hilly city. And I live in a three storey walk up...
Do you see sudden jumps up/down during an activity? In that case, the ambient pressure sensor in your watch has a problem.
On other Garmin models, some owners have experienced that it only happens when they wear clothes, which generates static electricity. Submerging the watch in mild soap water has also helped for some.
If it is constant at 40000 m, and calibrating doesn't help, your ambient pressure sensor is probably fully broken. Calibrating instructions here: support.garmin.com/.../
Does your watch show temperature? In other Garmin models, the ambient pressure sensor and the temperature sensor are in the same component, and they tend to fail together. So if your temperature also shows '--', your ambient pressure sensor is probably broken too.
I used to see massive jumps in elevation, often had elevation recorded on flat terrain and no elevation recorded in hilly terrain. I am now getting nothing whatsoever.
i will try the calibration and see how that goes. failing that what do you suggest?
Ok. Too bad that I doesn't show temperature. The temperature is not worth much anyway, but it is a good diagnostics help in these situations.
If your sensor is broken, there is not much to do. If it is under warranty, get it fixed. If not, you will probably find it too expensive to get it fixed.
Theoretically, there may be some workarounds, but I doubt it: Your watch also has GPS altitude, but I have never seen a Garmin watch, which you could force into saving the GPS altitude to the .fit file instead of saving barometric altitude. So forget about getting altitude in .fit files through native Garmin behaviour.
On high end Garmin watches, you can setup a datafield with GPS altitude in activities. Then you can at least see it while performing the activity, but it will still not be saved. But I don't know if the VA3 has this option.
There are also some third party datafields, which allows you to save information into the .fit file. Some of them can be configured to show and save any available data from the watch. But again - I don't know if your watch supports those datafields.
