Hi everyone,
I own a fenix 7 standard since may. Out of the box I was asked to update it to 17.28, if I remember well. I've done some runs with 17.28 and HR was totally crap. I made some research and ended up in the Garmin forum. Looking at the different subjects I found it could be a good idea to downgrade to 15.77.
But even with this software version, HR was inaccurrate compared to my forerunner 945. So I bought a HR monitor belt: HRM dual by Garmin.
With HRM, everything seems to be ok, and so, I remained with the old 15.77.
But four days ago, I was planning uphills fartlek, tried to pair the belt with the fenix and nothing happened. My 6 months Garmin HRM is full of liquid inside and out of service.
Ok, I went for the run without the belt, counting only on the wrist hr monitoring: endurance for 25min, then 7 times uphills for 1'30'' (pace of the 10k, 8% slope). As expected, HR is totally f...ed up: endurance hr was 20 puls higher than usual, uphills hr less than expected (should have reached my max HR) with no real decrease during 3' recovery time (down the hill).
Back home, I decided to give a try to the latest 19.38: saved settings to Garmin connect, saved other settings on computer, performed hard reset, received and installed 19.38. Hard reset again, reinstalled the save of the settings, the other savings on computer. Performed soft reboot.
No battery drain, one bug noticed is the light with the wrist movement.
Today was endurance (135-155 puls) and the time to give a try to 19.38 with great expectations. As you can imagine, if I am writting now, the result of the test is very poor: HR seemed ok at first, even if I experienced a high delay in change of HR. I mean I expected some delay but not as much as 20-30 seconds.
Then I climbed a small hill I use to run at the upper level of endurance ~155 and then the HR showed 184. And in the descent, when usually my HRM shows less than 135, the fenix still showed 187. I stopped running, was totally immobile and the HR dropped in less than 3 seconds to 115 , which is my normal rate after a descent and not moving anylonger.
This kind of behaviour repeated several times during the run. Walking shows a slow drop, being immobile a huge and fast drop (30-40 puls).
I must specify that as I've read a lot to understand the poor behaviour of my premium watch, I wear the watch above the bone, I shave my wrist, I wear the watch tightened. I can not tighten it more, I can assure you.
So my questions are: have you experienced the same HR problem, should I wait for an update to solve that, or should I claim for warranty? For both Fenix and HRM?
Thanks for the time you will spend reading and answering this.
(Reason of edits: text correction)
