This is aimed at Garmin support. Not sure who to even contact about these issues (no Garmin Alpha message boards) but I have been running into some issues with the implementation of the Ant+ tracker profile on the Garmin Alpha. This is almost definitely an issue with the Alpha firmware. I tried contacting Garmin phone support and for the Alpha and they had no idea what to do with this information.
In particular, when an Alpha is setup with multiple assets (ie dog collar or other alpha device. In my case two collars, and another Alpha), the per asset messages contain what appears to be uninitialized data if not all the asset devices are turned on before connecting to the main Alpha with Ant+. As far as I can tell, there is no way to know if the messages for the asset are valid or not, and if the asset is turned on. The asset state values are incorrectly set for this.
steps to reproduce.
configure Alpha 1 with 3 assets
asset 1: Collar 1.
asset 2: Alpha 2
asset 3: Collar 2.
now Turn all devices off.
Turn on Alpha 1 and Collar 2.
open a connection to Alpha 1 with the Ant+ tracker profile
You will get a series of page 1 and page 2 messages for each of the 3 assets even though the first two aren't turned on.
For the first 2 assets that aren't turned on the Status in page 1 (payload[5]) will usually contain a value of 0, meaning good status (instead of 0x40 for forget this device, or 0x20 for communication lost). The distance and bearing values will seem reasonable (possibly cached). Then if you request identifier information via a page 70 request (for pages 16 & 17), the device type (ie Alpha vs dog) may also be set incorrectly as well as the name fields being random.
This seems to mostly be an issue when you turn on asset 3. So the lower numbered assets are invalid.
