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Altimeter Fenix 5

This morning, as I always do, I drove 22 miles to work in the North west of England. According to several websites there is a difference in altitude between my start and finish points of circa 220 feet, the altimeter on my Fenix 5 shows no difference in altitude at any time in the last 4 hours. Is there a setting that I have wrong or is it a faulty unit?

I've had the watch less than a week so haven't noticed this before, so I don't know if this is the first occasion or whether or not the unit has been showing different altitudes previously.

Any assistance would be really appreciated.

0 cdd543 over 7 years ago

Oh ..auto calibrate on and watch mode auto

I calibrated both after resetting the watch and it.lasted two days before freaking out again.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

The pressure sensor problem is a hardware issue. Calibrating with the elevation, or elevation and sea level pressure does nothing to solve the problem, at least for my past three F5 units. So far it seems the most successful solution has been to replace all the hardware of the watch with a FR935 :(

0 wahnamch over 7 years ago

At the risk of jinxing this, my altimeter has been pretty stable since changing to a (Chinese) metal bracelet. So the idea of static caused by dry air, textiles and the silicone (insulating) strap would maybe make sense. I wonder how Garmin plans to sort this out, though....

0 cdd543 over 7 years ago

At the risk of jinxing this, my altimeter has been pretty stable since changing to a (Chinese) metal bracelet. So the idea of static caused by dry air, textiles and the silicone (insulating) strap would maybe make sense. I wonder how Garmin plans to sort this out, though....

Hmm, I'd be willing to give that a shot. Let us know how it goes.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

I find this discussion fascinating. I admit I do not check my altimeter every 5 minutes. But. I always look at the elevation graph on my run summary, and I have never noticed anything bizarre other than that my standard run ends 7-10 m lower than it starts (it's a loop). I have zero impression that static makes any difference, and my most "dramatic" GPS event last Sunday (GPS track just stopped 4km before the run ended) happened when I was wearing short sleeves and no objects around my arms or any where near that could have had an impact - but it was pouring rain, that much is true. At my current position barometer and altitude are absolutely spot on.

0 one282 over 7 years ago

Friend of my, who has F5 almost right after they came to market in Czech, does not report any issues as well. I must say, once I had downloaded watch skin, where altitude was a part of it, I saw changes immediately. After first rejected claim, I put my F5 to factory setting and leave them without any additional apps. You can check my comment #203 here in this discussion. I would never claim a difference 7-10m as you mentioned, but if you look into this watch behavior, you will see, that there is something wrong there.

0 Former Member over 7 years ago

Sure, I'm not disputing there is something wrong with all the cases mentioned here - I'm just saying I can't see anything wrong. I also hate to speculate, so I will say only this: my watch is plain vanilla - the only connect iq app I have is the power one for my footpod, and also, I never run with my phone connected.

0 one282 over 7 years ago

You are describing the same as my friend - he has as well no issues at all - so I guess, there is definitely hardware issue in my F5. I guess you are one of the guys, who has a good piece of hardware in F5. I hope F5 exchange will solve this, but I am a bit afraid about the situation happened to Dan_iel - after three claimed F5, he ended with FR935 ... :-/

0 cdd543 over 7 years ago

I called into garmin support today and they said they are aware of the issue, but that exchanging will probably do no good. He added me to their case list to notify when they have resolution. He also made the comment that "most" and then he corrected to "many" are having the same issue. I could live with regular calibration, but when I'm unable to get recordings of my activities due to these issues, it really starts to suck. My device started freaking out prior to skiing today and even after calibration it tanked at recording two different sessions. The long soapy water soak is the only thing that seems to straighten it out for a couple of days. The gamin rep also advised that I could just return the device to REI.

0 taniwha33 over 7 years ago

I have the watch for almost a year now (almost had it on day one).
Altimeter has been terrible for a couple of weeks now. I did not have any serious issues prior that and had almost trouble regarding the altimeter.
I called the Garmin office on the french page and I was told it was a known issue, based on sw and that they were working on it.