Activity won't sync after running without phone

Hi Vini,

Yes, I can confirm the issue exist in v10.43. It was working fine with the previous stable versions.

If you have Wifi connection set up on your watch, you can disable the Phone connection and start a sync with Wifi, it will upload the activity, you don't need to restart the watch.

I put the Phone connection and Sync shortcuts to the Controls menu, so it just a few button press more. Still a bug though.

Hi crt_hun,

Thanks for the reply, I will try this workaround in my next run.
Anyway, that's something that Garmin needs to look at.

Enjoy your day!

Hi. 
I’m usually doing my runs leaving my phone home. 

Fenix7XSS + HRM-Pro (iPhone Xs). 
On new firmware never observed behavior you described. 
Saw it sometimes in the past on earlier software versions but usually sync with PC over cable worked for me. 

BTW: Garmin is not recommending downloading data from the strap after activity. I did it in the past couple times when I had with me phone and always it caused activity duplication in Garmin Connect. 

I am using an Android phone, that might be the reason you couldn't reproduce. Also, try to disable the automatic activity upload option in the settings, it is (intentionally) disabled on my watch.

I always hard reset the watch after any software upgrade but will try it.

Adam-1972 said:

I did it in the past couple times when I had with me phone and always it caused activity duplication in Garmin Connect.

It duplicates the activity because by the time you finish downloading the HR it's already synced with GC which causes duplication when you sync it again with the new values.

Little bit inconvenient method to disable the phone connection, download the HR and then enable it again which I am doing for years now as I had sent multiple, detailed bug reports with steps, screenshots and proposed fix but nobody cared.

Adam-1972 said:

BTW: Garmin is not recommending downloading data from the strap after activity.

Well, it sounds a little bit counterproductive to me. All the Garmin watches and HR straps support the HR downloading feature and they use this feature for advertising the devices.

It is a bug and should be treated as such. My easy fix to handle the situation of duplicated activities and incorrect metrics would be either automatically start to download the HR on saving if the strap was connected at the beginning of the activity or a confirmation screen before saving if the HR was connected at any time during the activity. That would avoid activity duplication and would ensure proper metrics calculation as well.

The best would probably be a global system setting with these 3 options and everyone could select which method they want to use:

* Automatic download on saving
* HR download confirmation screen
* None (default)

Hi Garmin_Chris, 
I did a Hard Reset, but problem was again reproducible.

I don't know if it is worth mentioning, but I use Android as well.

I notice the issue in two cases:
1. When I leave the phone home, finish the activity, Save it and download the HR, then it won't sync unless I turn watch off and on again.
2. When I bring my phone with me, stop the activity (without saving), turn my phone to airplane mode, save the activity, download the HR from the strap, then turn air plane mode off in my phone (I do this to avoid duplicate activities in GC when downloading the HR from the Strap). I try to sync it in GC and also in the watch (menu > connectivity > Phone > Pair phone)

The issue is permanent when I do one of the two option above.
I will try to make a video next time I go for a run.

Why do you manually download the HR data every time? That's really meant for swimming when the watch can't communicate in real time with the HR strap and you need to download the HR data at the end of the swim. When running you should be getting real time HR from the strap to the watch. Surely you could eliminate that one step to narrow down the debugging here?

Hi unixcrab,

I mentioned in my previous post that I like to wear the watch a bit loose in my arm (just personal preference).
As you might know this can cause HR misreading, so I download the HR when I finish my run to avoid that.
Anyway, the strap exists to record the HR and the watch gives you the option to download it, so I only can suppose that this is allowed and shouldn't cause a problem, otherwise the option to download it would not be there.

I will try to perform a test and save the activity without downloading the HR to see if the HR download is really the issue.
Will also try to record it and post in here.

Hi Vini,

If you get the notification at the start of the run activity that the HRM-PRO is connected then the optical HR stops taking readings and it doesn't matter how you wear the watch. You could even take it off and put it in your pocket. I _never_ do this manual HR download after running as the data is constantly transferred during the run. I assume the download option is there as a backup in case your watch loses the connection to the strap for some reason (very rare). If you see the running dynamics data missing then you could go back and download the data manually, but I've never had the need. 

After a swim though, when I save the activity you can see during the saving process that the watch does a data transfer from the strap because it can't communicate in real time under water.