How to disable HR data search after pool swim

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Add your voice to the requests to have this search ignored when not connected to a strap by contacting Garmin Support. It’s annoying and appears to be an easy fix to get around. A simple piece of logic in the code.

Just out of curiosity, do you have a HR strap configured on the watch? The reason I ask is I'd be interested to see the behaviour if you do not vs if you do. I am thinking the logic here is, if you do have one configured it makes sense to search for it after a swim as the watch cannot know if you are using it or not and it does not expect to connect to it during and activity on account of the water.

Perhaps an option in the swim activity to ignore sensors would fix the issue as you could have multiple swim activities some ignoring sensors some not. For example you might open water swim in training, no sensor, but in a Tri you might open water swim with a sensor.

But, yeah, <back> button to bypass at the moment as mentioned.

I do have a strap connected and it annoys the hell out of me that I have to interfere with the save routine after every swim. Before the swim starts the HR ic connected them you swim, then you download the data. All good so far. Without the strap there is no connection before the swim so there should be some logic that says ‘no strap therefore no download after swim’. 

I have two straps paired but I do not use them for pool swim (I use it once to confirm how it relates to optical sensor and it was not so bad). If possible to detect at the begging whether strap is in use that's ideal, but I'm not sure whether strap need to be detected before swim to get data later, so maybe this is way watch is searching for data. If automatic way of doing it is not possible, simple option for pool swim activity to disable external HR will also do the job. Maybe it's region depended but I swim two times per week and according to what I see 99.99% of people do not use HR Strap for swimming, so why I need to click every time few times to ignore something that almost no one use :) 

Not sure that logic would work. When do you start your activity? Most would start the activity in the pool so there is no reliability of the connection with the water factor. So you could be wearing the strap but the sync would be disabled as it didn't connect at the start of the activity. The use case here is without the strap but the logic needs to cater for both scenarios.

My question was because I was curious if that particular search routine was because a strap was connected to the watch at all, but OP says he has straps connected but not used for the pool swim.

Really, the only way I see this issue being resolved is being able to disable sensor per activity. That way you knowingly start the activity that you have set-up with no sensor.

It could be as easy as to not auto search for hrm strap by default but to show "download HRM data" just above or below the "Save" item in the post-activity menu.

brookes2622 said:

a strap was connected to the watch at all,

That is why the search is undertaken, because there is a strap in the sensor pool. I usually don’t use a strap for pool swimming but still get the request to download data after the swim as long as the strap is in the sensor pool. If there isn’t a strap in the sensor pool then the watch does not look for external heart rate data when saving.  

brookes2622 said:

disable sensor per activity

There should be no need to do that. Whenever you start an activity the watch searches for any sensors in the sensor pool connecting to any that are active. The issue here is that even if the strap is not seen due to inactivity the watch still seeks to download data from an inactive sensor. Simple bit of logic, no active strap, no seeking to download data when saving the activity.  

Dr Phil said:

Simple bit of logic, no active strap, no seeking to download data when saving the activity.

As I said before, when starting an activity you are probably in the pool and the connection by the watch to the sensor is unreliable so the watch cannot know you are not using the strap and so the default behaviour, search at the end. It cannot disable the search just because the strap was not active at the start nor immediately when saving the activity because it simply cannot know if you are actually wearing the strap.

Could prompt you at the start as another option I guess. The logic is not simple.

brookes2622 said:

when starting an activity you are probably in the pool and

Yes I am in the water when starting the activity. However, you always have to connect to the strap before starting the activity and that you cannot do if you are in the water with the strap submerged. The logic is simple provided the strap is connected before you get in the water, as it should be, and before you start the activity.