Just bought a Fenix 5 Plus and am having this exact issue.
Anyone been able to fix?
Just in case you have not performed a hard reset or checked the holes in front of the sensor for dirt yet.. it is worth a try. How do you calibrate? Manually enter the altitude, DEM or GPS? How is the altimeter indoors when you sit around, does that also show up and down drift every few minutes?
To me, this looks like GPS elevation data, rather than barometric elevation data.
So my guess would be that the watch saw an error in the barometric elevation signal and used fallback to GPS elevation.
Whenever you suspect that there are problems with the barometric altimeter, the first thing to check is the Ambient Pressure signal. This is the sensor signal, from which both Elevation and Barometric Pressure are calculated. You can enable Ambient Pressure as a datafield within an activity.
I have a suspicion that you will discover that Ambient Pressure shows no value or some insane values. I can't see any other reason that the watch should report an error when you try to calibrate the altimeter (assuming of course that you were not trying to calibrate from GPS in a spot where you could not get a GPS fix).
There are some discussions in the F6 forum about issues with altitude
forums.garmin.com/.../6x-sapphire---incorrect-altitude-recording-strange-altitude-profile-jagged
It seems to me that you got similarly issues. Maybe it's software related.
hi, I’ve just bought a fenix 5 plus, having the exact same problem, I am pretty new to this running watch world, did you manage to find a solution?
I called tech support and they had me send it back and they sent me a new one. No issues with new unit.
So it’s a known fault? I will get in touch, thank you.