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v13.22 Frequent Bluetooth/ANT disconnects

Aerobee
over 1 year ago

I am noticing two types of frequent disconnects with Beta 13.22 that did not appear to be present before.  Perhaps these are also leading to increased battery drain which has decreaded the time between charging by about 50%.

1.  I broadcast my heart rate to both a Peloton bike and my iPad for various workouts.  I am getting frequent drops in the HR broadcast to my Peloton in both ANT and/or Bluetooth and frequent drops in HR broadcast to my iPad (BT only).  The dropouts last from a few seconds to a few minutes before automatically reconnecting.

2.  I am also noticing frequent BT disconnects between my watch and iPhone in general during periods of broadcasting my HR to either the Peloton bike or iPad.  I don't notice BT disconnects between my watch and phone at any other time.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    HEUREKA !!! I got it. After being angry and complaining several times in this forum about this battery draining and Bluetooth reconnection issue I tried many things like a soft reset, fully charging, disabling sensors auto connect etc. But nothing really helped. Then I bit the bullet and did a total factory reset of the watch. Et voilà !!! This did the trick. The watch is now back to normal. 6 to 7% of battery usage per 24h on my now again beloved fenix 7s solar (iOS 16.5.1) even with a little of 15min gps. Sadly I had to reconfigure all the settings, rearranging the glances and finetuning the activities. This will take a while. And I will install further watch faces and addons with care and peu a peu. 

    But what exactly was causing this issue ? I don’t know. Maybe one of the crappy third party addons or watch faces i had installed or the firmware upgrade process itself. Nevertheless I am fine now with the newest version 13.22. I hope this is helpful for you and there’ll be no more stressful factory resets in the future. 

    P.S. So it seems the firmware itself works fine. Maybe garmin has to have a more restrictive approach with third party stuff. Just a guess. 

    Have a nice day. 

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to aa4b3be6f1304a968630ff7ab38de167

    Well, seems to have worked for me as well, but I am really not thrilled about the prospect of re-setting-up the entire watch each time something goes wrong. Only one third party data field was installed, the rest all stock. A config backup option guide would be nice. It does not to be fancy, simply coping files to my Mac/Pc would be fine.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to aa4b3be6f1304a968630ff7ab38de167

    Tempting. So far I took the other nuclear option and downgraded to 11.28 and things have been sailing smoothly (aside from a few workouts with only OHR because I forgot to repair all HR straps). Maybe I'll be brave an upgrade to 13.22 and maybe now is the best time since I haven't set up things completely so another downgrade won't be too painful.

  • 0 over 1 year ago

    So I finally bit the bullet and did a factory reset about a week ago. Results have been somewhat mixed.

    The good:

    • Bluetooth disconnections to the phone are far less frequent now, syncing is much quicker. This is what I hoped for!
    • Battery life does seem to have improved - now ~10%/day with Bluetooth, all-day heart rate monitoring, and around an hour of GPS activity per day.

    The bad:

    • Disconnects are not gone completely - I've had a couple of times where notifications were missed due to being disconnected, and Livetrack failed to start once because Bluetooth had disconnected. But much much better than before.
    • One day battery drain was a lot more, about 25%, which is closer to what I was getting with the constant disconnects (but no disconnect issues this time). Not sure what happened there.

    The ugly:

    • I lost all training progress, which basically started over as if I were a brand new user. I thought most of this was supposed to sync up via Physio True-up, but no amount of syncing got my previous status back. I don't know if this was a bug or if it simply still doesn't work the way it should. This has been very frustrating! Data that failed to sync after the factory reset includes: VO2 Max, Race predictions, Training Status (Load, Load Focus), Training Readiness, HRV Status, Body Battery (dropped from 87 to 27 after the reset), Heat Acclimation, all running and cycling personal records (still correct on Garmin Connect, but refuses to sync to the watch). Was this a bug? Is this still not implemented in 2023?? I thought it was supposed to work...

    And of course, the question is why these disconnects started happening in the first place, and why did a factory reset fix it? There's still a bug lurking somewhere, would be nice to fix the real underlying issue so people don't have to go through the pain of factory reset - which should never be necessary!

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Garmik

    I can confirm that your training data should have synced to your watch after the hard reset. Mine did; I can't say how long it took exactly, but maybe 60 minutes. 

    Using a F7s Solar, my battery usage is roughly 8 to 10 % during 24 hours. PulseOx off, light 20%, gesture after sunset, no activities, no connect iq.
    I haven't detected any disconnects yet, but to be true, I leave my phone constantly somewhere, and in Europe, the walls are very effective at blocking Bluetooth, so ...
    For reference, after the reset, Garmin Connect uses on average 1 hour of background time on my iOS device, coming from 4 to 5 hours.
  • 0 over 1 year ago

    Just saw this with 14.23 

    Added Device Settings Backup and Restore.

    Love it. Hope it will work as intended and make it easy to reset and restore the watch.

  • 0 over 1 year ago in reply to Michael0000

    LOL, that backup and restore would have been so nice about a week ago! At least I was able to use the mobile app to screenshot all of my settings and then reference that to go back and restore all settings post-reset. It sill took the better part of an hour and 88 (!!) screenshots.

    Still wondering what happened with my training data not syncing. Perhaps it was related to the fact that it took several attempts to get Garmin Connect Mobile to even see the watch after the factory reset. Who knows. Frustrating that it wouldn't even sync after the initial failure. I just setup a brand new Edge 840 today and it pulled over everything seamlessly, so yeah, I guess it was supposed to work that way on the Fenix.