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Does Forerunner 45 require WiFi and Bluetooth to connect?

John
over 2 years ago

During a recent delivery by sea I noticed my Forerunner 45 did not connect to my iPhone. I was within Bluetooth range at all times, but there was no WiFi on the yacht. Does the Forerunner 45 require both to be available in order to connect to the iPhone it is paired to? If so, why is a Bluetooth connection not enough?

TIA

- John

  • 0 over 2 years ago

    Bluetooth is enough. Wifi is never used for connecting the watch to the phone.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to e7andy

    And yet the Forerunner was unable to connect with the iPhone until I got into port, when it started to work again. I'm heading back out to sea this morning so will have another opportunity to test this.

    Many thanks for your comment.

     - John

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to John

    Did you have a data connection for the phone? The app Garmin Connect only works with a data connection. There is no offline syncing.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to e7andy

    By data connection do you mean a physical cable? No, I didn't use a physical cable - I was trying to use the wireless sync feature on the iPhone.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to John

    I'm mean a connection to the internet (more specifically to the Garmin servers) for the phone.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to e7andy

    While I'm at sea I have no connection to the internet - I'm completely off the grid. All I want to do is download the data the Forerunner has collected on my sleep to my iPhone.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to John

    You can't do that without a data connection.

    Use the widgets on the watch to look at the data. 

  • +1 over 2 years ago in reply to John

    Just to expand a bit on what e7andy is saying:  The Garmin Connect app on your phone is designed to not store your data locally, but rather only on Garmin's servers.  (you can verify this by going into airplane mode and then opening it.  You will get an error on every page with no data present).   So, while your watch can be connected to your phone without an internet connection, there really isn't much point as you can't sync anything. The sync process is really the phone simply transferring the data from your watch to Garmin and then acting as a client to view it.  Since it can't cache your data, it refuses to take data at all unless there is somewhere to send it to.

    There have been complaints raised in the past that people would like the phone app to cache their data so that it doesn't have to go fetch it each time (and you could sync without an internet connection), but that would require a redesign of the app, and there has been no indication that Garmin is moving in that direction.    As e7andy says, your only choice is to look at the data on your watch.

  • 0 over 2 years ago in reply to WizardlyHat

    Sorry for the tardy reply, but I'm just back from my last voyage. This explanation makes complete sense to me. It's a problem given that I want to review my bio data while en route, but it makes complete sense. :-)

    Many thanks.