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Wrong Time Zone on the Garmin Connect Web Site

Ian
over 5 years ago

Whenever I complete a workout using my Garmin Instinct running firmware 5.10, the workout appears on the Garmin Connect web site with its time zone set to GMT -4 Atlantic Time (Canada & Central America), which is wrong. My time zone is GMT -5 Eastern Time (US & Canada) and I have Garmin Connect set to use the correct time zone in Settings -> Display Preferences on the web site.

My watch shows the correct time, the workouts show the correct time (both on my iPhone and on the web site), but the time zone is wrong on the web site. I can't seem to figure out what I'm doing wrong or what setting I need to look at, or if this is a bug with either the Instinct or the web site.

Before I contact support I wanted to see if anyone else has experienced this issue. I know I can edit the workout to change the time zone which is what I'm doing, but I wonder if there is a way to get it to assign the correct time zone from the start.

Thanks.

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to MiHighGator

    The issue is with your time zone setting with your Garmin Connect. If you change the time zone there to your current time zone, your indoor activities will record correctly.

    https://connect.garmin.com/modern/settings

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to nbrowne1
    nbrowne1 said:
    The issue is with your time zone setting with your Garmin Connect.

    No, it’s not.

  • 0 over 5 years ago

    As far as I can see on my own data, this issue happens only during the Daylight Saving Time (DST) period (in Europe also called Summer Time), and only on activities not using GPS. 

    In fact the time zone is matematically correct, it is just the time zone name that is wrong. I am in the Central European Time zone (CET), it is GMT+1 (in summer GMT+2). In summer, at indoor activities, the tooltip info over the time of the activity on its detailed page, shows the zone GMT+2 (perfectly correct) and the label South Africa Standard Time, which is wrong, but it matches perfectly with the CET+DST. I see absolutely no reason why I should be concerned about the wrong TZ label, since the TZ shift self is correct, and the time too.

    The reason why it happens is easy to understand, while at GPS activites, the time and TZ info come from the GPS satellites, in indoor activities it comes from the watch memory, and the watch likely just passes the time in the standard numeric format with only a numeric TZ shift. And the application then simply takes the first match for the numeric TZ in the numeric-to-name table.

    In other words - the conversion from TZ label to TZ shift is unambiguous, while the reverse conversion from TZ shift to TZ label, neded at indoor activities, is ambiguous, and the current system misses the data for solving the ambiguity.

    The proper solution would require the change of storing and transmitting the time values so, that it would include not only the numeric TZ shift, but also the TZ name or ID. That would have to be done at all existing watch models, and in the same time the system would have to be also backwards compatible. Looks like quite a lot of work for just a minor unimportant issue. There might be a quicker dirty solution by using the TZ setting from GC, but that would introduce a bunch of new problems, because many users are travelling, and would have to adjust the TZ setting in GC each time they move to a location in a different TZ. Another dirty possibility would be using the TZ name from the last GPS activity, but that would introduce again a number of new problems (i.e. you could have moved in between).

    That told, it would be certainly nice if it got fixed in the future, but if I were the project manager responsible for it, it would be pretty low on my priority list.